Measuring traffic on your Web site

Is anyone out there?

After the excitement of launching a new Web site wears off, this is the question that lingers.

Analyzing your Web traffic can yield valuable information, but, like all data, only if you know what you’re looking at and how to interpret it. For example, you might get excited to see or hear a report that your site had 1,298 hits on the first day. Don’t jump up and down just yet. Hits don’t tell you how many people showed up or even how many pages were viewed. Each file called up on the server equals a hit. So a page with a dozen graphics–pictures of homes, for example–would yield at least 12 hits.

Even when you understand the terminology, you still have to take care in your evaluation. "The raw stats can be quite accurate," says TAR Director of Information Services Joe Poole, "but you don’t always know what you’re measuring." As an example, Poole describes a situation where someone on a dial-up modem gets disconnected multiple times. A report on this activity looks like several brief visits from different users. Another potentially misleading stat is traffic breakdown by state. Often, the top state is Virginia, simply because all AOL users are logged as coming from that location.

Once you understand the statistics themselves, the value of Web traffic data rests on knowing what you want to evaluate. Poole suggests that the information on numbers of sessions can give you reasonably good insight into the total number of people visiting. Once you have an idea of the size of your audience, you should examine what pages they look at the most.

Poole also believes you can learn a lot from exit-page stats, or where users were before leaving your site. "If you find out your home page is your number-one exit page, you may want to take a hard look at that page. You’re not sending them anywhere deeper into your site, or maybe they are finding you by mistake in the first place." A page with high exit numbers is not necessarily a bad thing, though. "If it’s a listings page or a page with your contact information, I would think you’re meeting your goals," Poole says.

Referring information can also give you valuable information on where people found out about your site. If you have been submitting your site to scores of search engines, but you don’t see many of them in your referring domains stats, you might need to re-examine your search-engine strategy.

Software and Web-based services to measure your Web stats run the gamut from free to very expensive. Poole recommends checking with your Internet service provider first to see if they offer this service free to those sites they host.

Most importantly, Poole warns to not get discouraged if your numbers aren’t where you want them to be. "At this point, your main goal should be to develop a presence on the Internet," he says. "As more buyers look online for real estate services, you’ll be in position to capitalize on it."

Illustration © Artville.

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REALTORS®, visit www.tar.org.