How To Avoid Web Traffic Disasters, Part 2

Disaster #2. Not Using Your Mirrors

If you don’t use your mirrors in your car you have no way of knowing where traffic is coming from or where it’s going to and you will crash. It’s the same with your website.

You have to use your ‘mirrors’ to check on where your traffic is coming and where it is going to on your website. It’s only when you start to monitor the traffic that’s coming into your website (and where it’s going once it gets there) that you can really start to improve on what you’ve got.

For example, let’s just say you’re getting some good amounts of traffic and you know this because your website statistics tell you you’re getting 5,000 unique visitors a month.

Great - this is at least a starting point in terms of the information you have at your fingertips but it’s nowhere near enough. You want to start looking at SPECIFICS.

To give you a flavor here are some possible stats you want to get hold of;

- Top referring websites that send you traffic
- Top referring affiliates that send you traffic (if you have an affiliate program)
- Average length of visit of people to your website
- The most popular pages on your website
- Paths that people take through your website
- The most common exit pages for people on your website

All these things can power up your arsenal so that you can make INFORMED decisions about how to get MORE traffic and get more bang for your buck from the traffic you are getting.

"You obviously have to be careful here that you don’t fall victim to analysis paralysis."

Too many stats and too much time spent poring over them can be a bad thing.

But you should make a point of taking some time each month to take an ECG on your website’s performance. You NEED to know where you are getting traffic from so you can do more of the tactics that are working.

And you NEED to know where people go once on your website so you can convert more of them into optins, sales, affiliates etc.