Tracking Web Traffic
I own a bunch of websites. Seems to be a fun hobby, building more sites. On one of my sites I sell a certain item and it’s really good, high quality and actually pretty cheap. But I couldn’t figure out why I was hardly getting any sales. I was getting tons of traffic. The people who bought the thing loved it, I didn’t know what the deal was. So I started looking at my traffic logs.
Now, I am visually oriented person, I like to SEE things conceptually, get the big picture. Sure numbers are helpful, I use Google Analytics as my traffic logs as well. But about year ago, I ran across something called VisitorVille. It’s a visual representation of your web sites traffic. It’s very cool. It shows your website metaphorically and graphically as a city. And it uses buses (to haul people from specific search engines) to show you which people are visiting which pages. And what page they go to next. What literally happens is wehn someone comes to your site from Google, for example, then VisitorVille shows them as riding a ‘Google’ bus to their destination web page or ‘landing page’. This page is shown as a city building. The person literally gets out of the bus and walks into the building. If they go to another page, then they are shown leaving that building and walking or taking a cab to the next webpage on your site. You can easily see the entire flow of traffic on your site and get one big picture.
After a few hours of watching this entertaining flow of traffic, it dawned on me something was really wrong with my site. Lots of people and little sales. So I redesigned my site, improving flow and changed the text and reduced the columns to just one column and my sales literally doubled almost instantly. I tweaked it some more based on some of the stuff VisitorVille was showing me and sales went up even more. Amazing to think, if I had only done that months ago, I could have made more money in the meantime. Live and learn.
The moral of this blog is that it’s helpful to ’see’ what people are doing at your site. How long are they staying on each page, which pages do they like to go to, etc. VisitorVille has lots of other tools, besides just the map. It has tons of statistics, logs, live chat on your site, and much more. Now, it is a monthly service, but pretty affordable. I truly like it and use it regularly. In fact, it’s already paid for itself many times over. Check it out for yourself.