Understanding the flow of traffic on your website is a vital part of building a successful online presence.  Knowing where most of your traffic comes from, where it goes, what pages are viewed most often, and for how long are all key pieces of information for improving the success of your website.

If you're new to the Fission Web System, or do not have much experience working with a content management system, analyzing your site's traffic report can prove to be an intimidating task. Because of this, we've broken down Fission's Web Traffic report to make it easier to understand.

Your Site's Web Traffic Report Demystified

Every Fission Web System package includes in-depth "On-Server" statistics reporting so you can monitor your website's activity. Your web traffic report is accessible from the dashboard on the back end of all Fission CMS websites and lets you know who is visiting your site, how often they visit, where they came from, and how long they stayed. All of this information is automatically updated each night and you can view your results from any computer with internet access.

In order to better understand the information being reported, you should have a basic understanding of how your website is constructed and some of the terminology associated with it. Below is a list of keywords that you may find useful analyzing your site's reports:

• Hit: Every individual file sent to a browser by a web server is called a "hit."

• Page: A web page is an individual HTML document that is comprised of multiple files. When a visitor looks at a page (a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits. Keep in mind that "page" refers to a single page of a website NOT the entire website.

• Page view: Each time a visitor views a page on your website is considered a "page view."

• Visit: Every time someone or something (robot) visits your site counts as a "visit."

• Bandwidth: When referring to an internet connection, bandwidth is the amount of data that can be transferred from one point to another in a given time period.

As for the web traffic report itself, it may look complex at first, but it's actually been broken down into five simplified sections: When, Who, Navigation, Referrers, and Others.

• When: This feature indicates the total number of visitors to the site, as well as the number of unique visitors, page views, hits, and amount of bandwidth used. These reports are viewable historically for each month (or summary year totals), and can also be viewed by day of the week and rush hours, allowing you to track spikes or lulls in traffic.

• Who: Uncovers the geographical location of your site's visitors (by country), the number of visits made to your site by robots and crawlers like Google, and tracks the domains and IP addresses associated with each unique visitor. Consider these tools your audience demographics.

• Navigation: Records your site's visitor navigation (where, when, and how often they visit specific pages), the duration of each visit (length of time spent on your site) and the number of hits each file type (images, PDF's, videos, etc.) receives. The navigation report is important because it shows what parts of your site are being visited the most and which are not. This report can also be used to improve your bounce rate (what is this?).

• Referrers: This metric records the type of operating system, browser, or search engine being used by each visitor, the key phrases and keywords used to find your site, and the number of times your site is added to a visitors "favorite bookmarks." Knowing how visitors landed on your site can help determine your ROI on paid SEO as well help determine why some visitors might not be sticking around.

• Others: Presumably meaningless to a novice user, this reportlists important information regardingHTTP status codes, including temporary and permanent redirects,  as well as any errors that have occurred, such as an error 404 (Page Not Found).

Once you've analyzed your traffic reports and determined where your visitors are coming from, going to, and staying the longest, you can make decisions on how to improve your site­.

Too busy or unsure of what action to take next?

360 PSG has you covered with our Advanced Analytics and Executive Reporting packages. These "Off-Site" statistics take Fission's basic reporting tools to the next level and can be implemented on their own or as part of a larger search engine optimization or search engine marketing campaign.

360 PSG's Analytics Specialists will work with you directly to create a Google Analytics account and determine goals like e-commerce objectives or contact and request quote form usage, and then track and record the data required for your reports. By tracking conversions and determining a monetary value for each goal completed, our specialists can easily calculate your return on investment (ROI) , the results of which can be mailed each week or month, as requested, in the form of an executive report.

For more information on what web traffic reporting options are available for your business or to take advantage of our executive­­ analytics packages, please contact an account manager today.