cPanel - Analyzing Traffic

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for assessing success or for identifying possible weaknesses and take the necessary corrective steps. No matter if the information is good or bad, it's the kind of information you want to know if you care about the performance on your website, who is visiting it and what he or she is doing there.

The difference between hits, page views, visits and visitors.

Before going any further, let's define some of the terms we will be using when talking about web traffic analysis. In the previous articles we defined the website as a collection of interlinked files and hosting a website as the process of making those files available to the Internet users. The hosting computer needs to have a special software installed, the web server (i.e. Apache), that will "serve" the files to the visitors. Each file served to a visitor by a web server is called an individual hit. The files can be web pages (.htm, .asp, etc.), images (.gif, .jgp), downloads (.mp3, .doc), etc.

Besides text, a web page might also display pictures. In this case the number of hits required to see the page is the sum of the hits required for the pictures plus the hit for the actual html file. We define the page view as the collection of hits/files required to see a web page. It is clear now that counting the number of hits is not a reliable way of analyzing a website's traffic because as you can see, a one page view can range from one hit to hundreds of hits.

Humans are not the only ones surfing the net. In the next article, Understanding SEO, we will see that search engines use automated robots to crawl the Internet and index websites, and just like a human being they might request to view only one page or multiple pages. Therefore we define a visit as the request from someone or something (robots) to "see" one or more page views/hits.

The difference between the search engine robots and real persons is that the latter use a browser to navigate the Internet and their actions are "human", not repetitive or random. By definition, a visitor is a human being visiting your website. Visitors are the best measurement of website's traffic.

cPanel's Web/FTP Statistics Panel

cPanel has already some built in options that allow you analyze traffic, options such as: Webalizer, Analog, AWStats and Latest Visitors. If you have more than one website hosted on the account, worry not, separate statistics are compiled for each additional domain and are available in the [Subdomains Stats] panel.

Latest Visitors.
It's the only live statistic and it shows the last 300 visits to your website and some interesting related data. Besides technical data such as the name of the entry page date, the IP or the return HTTP code (200 for success, 404 for not found, etc.), you can find valuable information when analyzing the referrer and the agent data. The referrer is the source of the traffic - the last webpage/link that the visitor before coming to the website. Here's an example:

By looking at the referrer link, we can see that the visitor arrived on our website via an organic search on the Google.com search engine and the keyword used was hosting articles. Wow! We now have relevant information (the source plus keywords) that we can use to analyze the traffic. As the visitor moves through the site, the referrer link changes to reflect the last page browsed.

How about the agent? The agent is the name and version of the browser used by the visitor except then case when the visitor is a search engine spider; the agent displays the name of the spider and usually a link to where you can read about it. While knowing the browser version might not help you too much, analysing traffic to identify if and when a search engine robot visits your website helps a lot when it comes to answering questions like: why is not my website indexed? May I post articles and not get penalized for duplicate content?

Here's a snapshot of a MSN bot crawl attempt. Gotcha! You can see that it first reads the robots.txt file to check if it is allowed to crawl the website.

Webalizer.
If Latest Visitors is a snapshot in time of the traffic activity, Webalizer gathers, organizes and stores traffic information, so you analyze the traffic data for a longer period of time. Basically for each month you can see:

• daily and hourly statistics of hits, files, pages, visits and kilobytes transferred;
• top ten of your entry and exit pages;
• tops of your referring links (internal and external) and keywords used;
• statistical data for user agents (browsers, robots, etc) and country of origin.

How to analyze traffic.

Now that you have the statistical web traffic data, the question is: what inferences can you make based on that information? There is no right or wrong answer to this question, each webmaster decides by himself which combinations of data are relevant for measuring his goals. Still, here are some guidelines on how to analyze your web traffic based on the statistical data obtained with cPanel's tools:

• General Information. You have a general view of how visited is your website and what is happening. By looking at historical data you can spot trends, problems or visitors' patterns (use Webalizer-Monthly Statistics);
• Find out where the visitors are coming from. By analyzing the source of the visits, you can get an idea about where the traffic is coming from. Is the bulk of your traffic coming via search engines? Or is it coming via referral links? If it's coming via referral links, how well is that banner campaign doing in terms of number of visits? You can find out by tracking the traffic coming from that link/banner. (use Latest Visitors-Referrer data or Webalizer-Top referring links);
• Targeted keywords. Find out what keywords are people using in their searches before they come to your website. Those keywords are a good indicator of the keywords you are ranking high for, because usually people browse only the first 2-3 pages of the search engine results pages. Are these keywords your targeted keywords or at least relevant to your website? If not, then you're not getting quality traffic and you need to try and improve your site content. (use Latest Visitors-Referrer data or Webalizer-Top keywords);
• SEO campaigns. A combination of source - keywords data provides a pretty good assessment of your SEO efforts. Identify the organic search sources and keywords used. (use Webalizer-Top keywords and Webalizer-Top referring links);
• Publish articles. A good way to increase traffic is to syndicate or publish content from your website on articles, feeds, etc. However, there's a risk involved: duplicate content. If some other page is credited as the original author, your page will get into supplemental index and not rank in the search engines results pages. There are a few factors used to determine the original author, an important one being the crawling date. By identifying from your traffic if and when that new article was indexed, you can decide when to publish it on other sites without fearing duplicate content penalties. (use Latest Visitors-Referrer data and Page title);
• How well a webpage is working for your visitors? Web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. By analyzing the entry and exit pages you can get an idea of how well specific pages are performing. If a webpage is "champion" in the exit pages top, then that page needs attention. (use Webalizer-Top 10 exit pages).

As with any statistical data, the number of samples can be a key factor in your analysis; the more samples (visitors) you have, the more accurate your interpretation will become. However, for a more detailed analysis we would need more relevant data not just more samples. More relevant data can be obtained by using professional traffic tracking tools and installing tracking code on web pages. A free tracking tool is Google Analytics. The Google Analytics articles explain how to use the additional data gathered to make better inferences about your visitors.