Page 54 - Payout Magazine Online Volume 8.9

arketing programs depend on accurate traffic measurement
Mderived from web analytics, which is key to understanding
Web Analytics and whether their strategy works. You may be unfamiliar with this
terminology because unless you’re involved in SEO (search engine
optimization), the nomenclature doesn’t make its way outside these
Traffic Measurement: circles often.

The tedious work involved gathering data about a website’s
hoW it WorkS performance makes some webmasters pay an outside firm
specializing in this work. The cost of paying professionals to perform
this work gets expensive, leading to marketers becoming experts
with SEO.

New measurement techniques making their way around SEO
circles help save time and make the task easier. The best way to
master the new techniques is practice. Each new technique derived
from previous ones get refined and are more effective. Following is a
detailed description of web analytics and traffic measurement, and
the relationship between them.

Tools to Retrieve the Data

Software tools for data retrieval vary in scope and ability to
present detailed and useful information. One problem with software
tools is cost. The cost is a bargain if you have a valid reason for using
the mountain of information available. The flip side is a beginning
SEO won’t understand most of it. It’s best to stay with the free
options for now.

One of the best free tools is Google Analytics. At first glance,
you might think it’s too complicated even for a free tool. You’re not
alone. There is a learning curve and the new terms take time to
master. Practice makes the learning effective and you’ll gain a better
understanding of page optimization and why the search engines
react based on the various ranking factors.

The information gleaned from the free tools provide limited
information, but good enough for many measurements most
webmasters worry about.

Basic Measurements You Should Know Well

Before we get into the details, remember a hit is nothing more
than a request by a web browser or a spider bot to view the files that
make up the web page. Each file represents one hit recorded by the
analytics software, which is not a useful measurement.

The number of visits recorded to your site include those who
visited more than once. The time span of visits to your site and
frequency is an important metric.

Cookies, which are small data files received by a browser from
the server recorded each time the cycle occurs, track requests used
for user identification or frequency of server access.

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