What to look for in Web site traffic reports

It's probably common knowledge by now that a Web site is a critical marketing tool for almost any small business. But did you know it’s equally valuable to identify who’s looking at your site—and how they found it?

All of that information and more is available in Web site traffic reports, typically provided to you by your Web site hosting service. These reports can generate a detailed profile of your Web site visitors and what they did when they got to your site.

Steve Sharp is a Portland, Ore., small-business owner who works in audio and video post production, and has been building and hosting Web sites for roughly 10 years. His clients range from musicians, bands and artists to furniture makers, filmmakers, and limousine companies. As a Web site host, he maintains the sites, updates content, and tracks how well the sites do their job.

Tracking keywords

"Traffic reports tell you who's visiting the site, how many visitors you have, where they're located, and if they found you through a link from another Web site or through a search engine. And, if it's from a search engine, the report will even tell you what words they used to search to find you," Sharp says. Those words are referred to as "keywords" and are crucial elements of Web site marketing.

Building relationships

Mike Shiley, a Portland-based documentary filmmaker and director, is one of Sharp's clients. The information contained in traffic reports is essential to his business. "To me the key benefit is to build brand recognition and product awareness—and a better and closer relationship with your client base. It's a competitive advantage large companies just don’t have. It’s speaking directly to your clients," he says.

Sharp emphasizes that the information generated in a traffic report also is essential to maintain a fresh, inviting Web site. "You don’t want to put a Web site together and forget about it. It needs to be updated regularly to maintain interest."

In addition to providing the tools to build your own Web site, Microsoft Office Live Small Business generates traffic reports containing the information discussed earlier—and more.

Here's a look at the wide-ranging information you can glean from site reports that track visitors to your Office Live Small Business Web site:

• Web site statistics summary details site visits, page views and search engine performance.
• Traffic reports quantify the number of unique visitors and various page view statistics.
• Search engine reports identify the search engines and keywords driving traffic to your Web site. (AdManager—included in Office Live Small Business—provides even more comprehensive reporting, including search engine and keyword traffic from both paid and nonpaid search results.)
• Referrers reports list Web sites, Web pages, domains, and domain types that are sending traffic to your Web site.
• Page statistics help you identify the most popular pages on your Web site and the most common entry and exit pages.
• Conversion reports offer insight into the effectiveness of Web pages containing call-to-action messaging, such as newsletter signups, and on the search engines or keywords that directed visitors to those pages.
• System statistics provide details on the screen resolution, browser, and operating system being used by visitors to your Web site.

In a nutshell, you can proactively guide the success of your Web site by doing two things faithfully:

1. Carefully monitoring site reports to learn all the key details about who's visiting your site, where they came from, and what they're doing when they get there.
2. Making changes when you see data that indicates you could get even stronger performance by adding new keywords or perhaps revising some of your messaging.

To accommodate more in-depth analysis, Office Live Small Business site reports can be easily downloaded in CSV format and imported into spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Office Excel.