Reading the Traffic design

If you’ve ever been on the road, chances are you know a bit or too about reading traffic patterns. Whether you know it or not, just by watching the cars around you, you can anticipate when people are going to make stupid moves. You see that person in the left lane riding the car right in front of them? They’re getting annoyed and about to cut it to your lane. And then it happens.

The same thing is true for site statistics. Yes, they do indeed have other uses besides just keeping track of how many hits and page views you’ve received. You can learn a whole lot about your site, your visitors, and what is working (and what isn’t) just by looking at your stats.

Analyzing

Mint:
One of the popular design and developer statistic scripts to use is Mint. By default one of the panels in Mint is the pages panel. This is probably generally overlooked, when it really shouldn’t be. The pages panel will tell you what your most popular pages are and the ones that were recently visited. As an author, telling what posts are popular is extremely important. You want to build off the highly successful and most read posts and get away from topics and writing styles that were not so well received by the audience.

Mint also has the ability to use peppers, which are add-ons for Mint. The must have pepper in my book is Trends. Trends does a lot of the analyzing for you by comparing pages (popular, new, old, best, worst, etc) from one time period to another for you to easily see the difference. Have a post that was super popular one week take a nosedive the next? Chances are there was not enough substance and as soon as the initial rush read it, very few other people were concerned.

Google Analytics:
Google Analytics can also provide a wealth of information, so long as you do more than look at the Dashboard after you log in. Navigate over the “content” section. You’ll find a quick summary of all your content statistics including total page views, unique reviews, and bounce rate. Try viewing the full summary of your top content. You’ll find a breakdown of the viewers per page, the bounce rate each page has, and the time people spent on each page. Just looking at it, I can tell that currently people rarely read more than one article at a time here, as the percent of exit and bounce rate on my top posts is all pretty high.

You can also use the “Site Overlay” feature to drilldown where your hits on your site on going from the the percentage each link on your site is clicked. I noticed a big problem - the link to my portfolio found in the footer was clicked the same amount of times as “Home”, and all the other DUI links in the right side navigation are barely clicked at all. That’s a big warning sign as to why content is not getting out there.

Awstats:
Even the ever simple Awstats which is included on just about any webhost contains valuable visitor data that can be helpful to you, which many people probably overlook. Awstats does in fact show you the average visitor duration as well as your top 25 page urls, web browsers, and links from external sites. Even without Google Analytics or another stats script / service, Awstats can do enough of a job for you to make some decisions.

Using any of the above methods, a combination of them, or whatever truly works for you you’ll be able to easily learn valuable data about your visitors, helping you make the improvements necessary to improve your site and content.

Improving

Reading and analyzing visitor data is the first step, but you can not simply end there. In order to improve your site, you must turn your findings into improvements. There are a couple of things to look for when looking at your statistic data which will help make your make the according site changes.

• Are page views being spread evenly? - If you have any kind of site that is very content based, its important to spread around the page views. Sometimes old posts sleep through the cracks and only newer stuff is seen. Other times, people read one article and leave. Looking at my own data, a lot of that is the case here on DUI. It seems after reading one article, most visitors leave. That means there are some major flaws in the design. In the case of DUI, I would believe that the navigation menu (right, sidebar) is not being seen fully and is leading to a decrease of clicks throughout much of the content. The key is to get both first time and frequent visitors to click through the site and explore all aspects of your content, not just one item.
• Where are your visitors coming from? - It’s important for you to recognize where the majority of your visitors are coming from. You wouldn’t want to mislead them into thinking the site they are on has nothing to do with the site they were looking for. Reaching out to those visitors will generally help them stay around a bit longer.
• What are you most popular posts (historically)? - It’s a must for you to highlight the most popular and sought after content your site might happen to provide. Chances are, its how your site gained its initial popularity, and visitors don’t want to spend all day looking for what they came to find. Make it easier by showcasing select content pieces on your site based on their all-time popularity.
• What are the design flaws? - As touched upon above, its fairly easy to determine what the major design flaws are of a site is an area you expect to be receiving a lot of click is barely getting any. It might now always be the most exciting thing to do, but making design changes, even when subtle, can have a big impact on the successfulness of your site.

Remember to keep checking your site statistics on a regular basis so you can make adjustments to make sure nothing is falling through the cracks. It’s never any fun to go unnoticed.