Starting an Online Business All-in-One For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Tracking Trends

If you sit at an outdoor café and watch traffic drive by, you begin to get a sense of patterns. You can estimate the number of cars that drive by; determine the most popular makes, models, and colors; establish whether the cars are zooming past or crawling by; and ascertain whether they're coming in groups or as a continuous stream.

You can apply the same techniques to monitoring your Web site traffic. If you want to understand the behaviors of the traffic, you need to know basic information and understand the trends that are occurring:

• The number of visitors coming to your Web site
• The number of unique visitors coming to your site
• Which Web sites are referring viewers to your site
• Which Web pages are the most frequently viewed and the least frequently viewed
• The number of Web pages that the average visitor sees in one visit

You can track this usage without monitoring direct Web site traffic, although this method mainly involves direct customer interaction. You can contact a research group to find sample visitors and perform usability testing, where the research group introduces visitors to your Web site, asks them to interact with it, and then studies their activities to see whether they can intuitively find their way around your Web site, place an order, and perform basic functions. Based on these user interactions, the research group makes recommendations to you about changes you should make to your Web site to make it more user friendly or easier to use.