2) Use third party traffic services. Search engine lists Internet audits and some are found under web counter. I had one service that gave me 50 search engines. I found that I was getting a lot of hits at 3-4 am from England. It is useful to take your time in find a service because some are better than other by a big margin. Here are some addresses http://www.internet-audit.com / and http://www.digits.com and http://www.wishing.com /. Some are free, but some charge a small fee.

3) How about my web pages? I would like to find out if I have a site that people like and maybe I can advertise these pages. You might want to get a second traffic analysis or a web counter. Here is an idea. Get an account at Commission Junction, a company that has paying banner for over 500 merchants. Sign up for a banner and then place banner at bottom of page. You will be able to gain a commission and then you can look weekly to find how many people visited your site. Check at http://www.cj.com/Affiliate/ourmerchants.asp?AID=14738&PID=93098 This is not most perfect method and you can only have banner on just one page at one you are using for analysis. But it is better than paying for a second service.

Whatever, you do. You need traffic analysis and need to examine sites in this article.

When you divide number of visitors by number of page views, this can give an excellent indication of whether traffic is transient or is staying on your site. If average is one page or under, you can be pretty sure that there is something on your pages that is scaring people off. Perhaps load time is too slow or your opening statement is inappropriate. Remember that due to bandwidth considerations, those first few elements that display as your page is loading may be deciding factor as to whether a visitor waits around for entire page to load.

Studying your web site traffic can take up a fair amount of time, but it is definitely worth it. Of course in amongst all this you need to be able to make time to carry out promotion, maintain linkages, develop new content etc etc etc. Running a large, content rich site is definitely not a part-time job!

Michael Bloch  michael@tamingthebeast.net  http://www.tamingthebeast.net Tutorials, web content and tools, software and community. Web Marketing, eCommerce & Development solutions. _____________________________________________ 

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