Why Should You Monitor Site Traffic

I've already looked at How to monitor website traffic, but why? What are the advantages?

Quite simply put, if your website traffic is at a good level now, why should you spend time & money looking at where it's coming from?

Put it another way - if in 6 months time your website traffic has dropped - what are you doing right now to raise that traffic?

That's the key to monitoring website traffic. If it's good now, you want to keep it that way. Run reports, find out which search engines are sending visitors for important keywords and what pages they are being sent to. And record this information.

In the future, if traffic is low or sales are lower, then you can easily look back to what's happening now and compare results. If traffic is the same but sales lower then it could be that you are being found for different keywords. These could be keywords that aren't as important or relevant.

If you have a change log for the site, you can then look back and see what's happened and maybe you can quickly reverse the changes and get the traffic back up again.

Traffic comes in peaks and troughs so it's easy to miss a gradual change in traffic and by the time you have noticed server logs have gone. So record key weeks while you have the chance.

Tomorrow - we'll look at what benefits we can derive from studying traffic.