It is important to know how to analyze website traffic if you want to manage your marketing effectively.  Traffic analysis can be critical to the long term success of a website. Learning how to determine where your traffic is coming from and what they are looking for on your site can help you provide better service and ultimately increase your overall income and profitability.http://www.isitebuild.com/trafficanalysis.htm

Not only should you know how to analyze the traffic, it is essential that you know what the different terms mean when reading a website analysis report.  One example is understanding the difference between page hits and page views.  These are not the same thing.  It takes several hits to count as a page view.  Knowing these subtle differences can mean the difference between effective marketing and failure.http://www.isitebuild.com/trafficanalysis.htm

Use the traffic tracking software that is typically included within your web hosting package. If you are unsure where it is located within your control panel area, contact your provider and ask for details on tracking or traffic logs. There are also software packages that you can purchase for website traffic analysis.http://www.wilsonweb.com/articles/traffic.htm  Free services like Google Analytics can also help you track visitors regardless of what is offered by the web host.http://www.google.com/analytics/

Review all of the parameters available within your software. This will give you a good overview of who your users are and what issues you need to address.

• Pay attention to the country of origin of your traffic. If the majority are coming from non-English speaking countries and your web site is written in English, you may want to consider other ways to accommodate those users.
• Check on how much time visitors spend on your site.  It is important to know if you are holding your users' attention, or if they are moving on because your site contains nothing of interest to them.
• See what the source of your traffic is. If your traffic is primarily coming from a search engine or another organic link, you will want to know which of those sources are the most productive. Then you can focus on maintaining those links as well as developing inbound links from similar websites.http://www.isitebuild.com/trafficanalysis.htm

Separate the statistics for the known sources that were paid sources. Analyze this traffic  separately from your organic (non-paid link sharing) sources. Determine how effective your paid advertising and placement campaigns are.  You will need to decide if you should continue to allocate money to these resources based on the traffic as well as on the comparison to actual conversion and sales ratios.http://www.vudumarketing.com/seo-blog/2010/09/19/creating-an-organic-link-profile/