Owning or being the webmaster for a website is a serious business. You want to know who’s visiting, where they’re from, what they’re doing while they’re on the site and when they left. To know important details like these, it’s necessary to dig through web logs or find a better way to do it.
Here are some of the benefits of using web logs and analytics to examine the traffic on your website more carefully.
Stop Running Blind
When you analyze web logs, you’re no longer running blind. Without examining web logs, you have no analytical information to inform you about the usage of your site. The site is live and maybe people are arriving and looking around, but you’re wearing a virtual blindfold and simply haven’t a clue.
There are many disadvantages to this including the inability to capitalize on your visitors. If they’re mostly visiting from one place like a specific Google search or as a referral from a link on a related website, there are things you can do in response to that. But when you don’t know, there’s no way to work to stretch a single into a triple. Why? Because you’re running your business like a horse with blinkers on where you cannot see anything other than what’s right in front of you.
Know Where Visitors Came From
Knowing where your visitors came from is key. When you know that 80 percent are coming from Google organic search results, you can dig into the search terms they used to find the site. Even if Google doesn’t supply much of that information for free any longer, there’s still the Google Console which provides more information on searches and other analytical options like SEMrush and AHrefs that can offer some additional insights too.
What Pages Did They Visit and How Long Did They Stay There?
Knowing which web pages people visited and how long they stayed is useful to know too. When you’re aware of the site’s most popular pages, you can work to add value to them. Including more reviews, in-depth content, and frequently asked questions increases the usefulness to visitors.
You can also build inbound links to the most popular pages for the search terms being used to access them. This way, they’re likely to rank better in Google in the future and drive even more traffic. And when Google can see that the page has been updated recently with better, longer content, more often than not they respond with improving the page’s ranking too.
From Where Did They Leave & Where Did They Go?
When they left, what page did they leave from and where did they go? It’s useful to know what the last page was that they saw before they chose to leave. Is it known where they went to next? Did they visit another page directly, go to Google to run a new search, or just close that browser tab?
Using web logs and analytics, you can also see what device they used to access the site. This is helpful to understand if your audience is mostly mobile users or desktop users. The site’s content length and layout can be adjusted to suit the predominant audience if you like.
Web log software makes it easier to access web log data quickly. It happily shortcuts the data hurdle while providing key insights about the website that is vital for owners to know about.
