As promised, this is the final installment on my series about understanding web traffic. In my first post about understanding web traffic last August, I started off with the basics and discussed the differences between a hit and a session. In part two, I delved into referring urls and keyword analysis and the different software you can use to obtain that information.

For the last segment, I'm going to concentrate on one of the most important things to track: 1st time unique visitors. As you probably guessed, these are visitors that have never visited your site before. Why are they so important?  For starters it gives you an idea of the number of people actually searching for your products in a very rough sense. More importantly, you can compare the number of contacts you received that day to the number of new visitors to get a rough conversion rate. These visitors represent a golden opportunity as they haven't been to your site before.

On the other side of the coin you have returning visitors.  These are people who found your site before and found it worthy enough to come back. Yet, another opportunity to capture prospective clients. When determining your visitor to contact ratio, these numbers will also need to be factored in. Unfortunately, you'll have to ask those people that contacted you whether they had been to your site before to determine if they were a returning or first time visitor. The number of returning visitors is usually a lot higher than first time visitors----if you have sticky content. If the number of returning visitors is low or very close to the number of first time unique visitors, and the number of daily contacts is very low, you may need to revise your site and/or add new content to encourage more people to contact you.  Keep in mind as your site gains ranking in the serps, you will be getting more non-essential contacts (spammers, lookie loos, other agents looking for information for their clients, etc) so you'll need to factor that out in order to get an accurate percentage of your conversion rate.

Lastly, the one other thing you should be looking at closely is your page data. Your website should be getting visitors hitting directly to your internal pages, if you have done a good job at optimizing it. In other words, not every visitor should be finding your home page to find you.  Now, the amount of traffic to your internal pages will of course, depend on the ranking of those pages in the serps. However, you should still see some traffic to those pages every month like clock work. By tracking the traffic patterns and ranking of those pages, it should give you an idea of what works as far as gaining visitors directly to those pages. Combining that with the layout of those pages and copy, will give you a basis to help boost traffic and the serps for your other pages. Along with this your tracking should be giving you a list of keyword data, giving you the most popular keywords your site is being found at. The data should match up with your own ideas of your most popular keywords, if not, then you may have better options to optimize your site to.  This data should also reinforce the stats for your page crawls, with the keywords for highly trafficked interior pages appearing high in the list.

Probably one of the most overlooked areas of tracking is the crawler report. It means just what it says, the amount of times (and by whom) your site has been crawled by se's.  Low crawler numbers would explain a low amount of visitors, because lower ranked sites are usually crawled far less than sites listed higher in the serps.  Another important tidbit is that if a crawler from one of the big three is missing from your list.  The only reason for that would be your site being banned by that se OR you have some type of No-Crawl tag listed in your site, probably in the htm.access file, robot.txt or Meta information.  If its there its probably an error, since why would you intentional not want  your site crawled.

If you have a template site from a company like Advanced Access, you have access to these statistics. Most major companies that offer real estate websites also give those owners this information. For those that have a custom solution or built their own site, there are several programs available that you can install on your server to track, organize and quantify your web traffic. Webalizer for example, is one.  For more programs, both free and paid, simply google web traffic stats. -Charles