Web traffic analysis is a good place to start understanding how your website is being discovered and used. It will tell you where your website traffic is coming from and what it does when it reaches your website. Getting the correct analytics package, the software that gives you the statistics which you analyse, for your web site is the first step on the path to understanding your web site traffic.

What Web Analytics Package do you need?

In all honesty it depends on what you need it to do. Defining your aims for the analytics should be the first stage of any analysis process you are looking to introduce. If you know what you need you can then choose the appropriate program to help with your analysis.

Possible Web Traffic Analysis Goals

1. Where does your traffic come from? – This is always a good start. Is your traffic coming from PPC, SEO, Media, Affiliates or direct traffic? Ensure that any anlytics package you select gives you this break down. If you use multiple system to perform your analysis your error factor will increase. If you use Google adwords for PPC, Atlas for your media tracking, affiliate network information and then have to guesstimate your SEO you’re in trouble. Ensure your solutions tracks all the channels you currently use, and those Internet Marketing channels you want to use in the future.
2. What revenue does my traffic generate? – Its surprising that many analytics packages will not track your sales. If you are an e-commerce business knowing what keywords generated which sales gives you a stronger position to develop your online strategy. If you want to know all of this ensure you can install it, or your agency can install it correctly/easily/cheaply some of the solutions may require significant changes to be made to your site
3. How much do you have to spend? – Good analytics leads to good web traffic analysis the best solutions cost money – some can cost a lot of money. Ensure that you have a budget in mind before you contact anyone about getting analytics for your web site. Cheap analytics can give a strong insight for your web traffic analysis but it can be inaccurate.
4. How much traffic will you be analysing? – Some analytics charge extra when you reach certain traffic levels . Keep this in mind when working out your overall costings. In some situations your billing will be dynamic and you dont want your costs to spiral when you drive higher levels of traffic than anticipated.
5. Whatis your bounce rate? - Your bounce rate is the rate at which people leave your site, generally under five seconds. If you have a high bounce rate and are paying for PPC traffic it is an indicator that the page is not doing its job and should be refined or your keywords changed. This level of web analysis can save you a lot of money in the long term

Contact and test your analytics before you start spending. Good analytics companies will give you a visual walk through of what their software can do to improve your website. Some analytics companies will give you free trials. Some will even let you have the software for free. So get on the phone, get discounts, get trials and test out software to see what works best for your web site and business.

I’ve tried to keep the list short – I’ll be publishing a longer list in the up and coming weeks. If you have anything that you think could help just give us a shout in the comments below.