“Trust, but verify” is an excellent motto in life. It’s nice to have independent verification of Google’s numbers and also better analysis tools of visitor behavior than the AdSense reports provide. You now have the option of linking your account to Google Analytics.
To get third-party information about your traffic, a good starting place is to visit Alexa. On Alexa, click the Traffic Rankings tab. Enter your site domain in the box and click Get Traffic Details. The Related Info page for your site will open. Next, in the Explore this Site box, click the Traffic Details link.
A number of different measures of your site traffic, including the daily page views graph shown in Figure 9-23, will be displayed.
You can use the Alexa metrics as a reality check in terms of whether it agrees with Google that your page views are going up (or down) over time, but you cannot use Alexa as an absolute measure of anything because of how the Alexa statistics are compiled. Alexa’s page-view metrics are based on information uploaded from a small toolbar, mostly installed by business users. This information is notoriously flawed for consumer sites, particularly ones without high traffic.
The next place to turn is your web server’s logs.
Depending on your web host, you should have access to a number of tools used to generate usable information from your web logs files. Web log analysis is the first and best place to look for data in addition to that supplied by Google.
Note
Raw web log files provide copious and dense information, but it is hard to extract anything usable from them.
Webalizer, shown providing monthly statistics in Figure 9-24, is available for almost all sites that are hosted on a Linux-based web server. If your web host doesn’t make Webalizer available to you, it almost surely will provide comparable software.
You can use the Webalizer monthly summary shown in Figure 9-24 to see if it confirms the trends shown in Google’s accounting of your page views. Next, click a specific month to get more detailed information about a whole range of topics, including:
Daily usage (Figure 9-25)
Hourly usage
Top URLs on your site (your pages that have the most visitors)
Top entry pages on your site (the pages most often used as the entry point to your domain)
Top exit pages on your site (the pages most often used as the exit point for leaving your domain, Figure 9-26)
Top referrer pages (the pages, by address, that have referred the most traffic to your site, Figure 9-27)
Top search strings used (in search engines) to find your site (Figure 9-28)
A great deal of the information provided is quite valuable. You should certainly keep an eye on daily usage statistics (Figure 9-25).
You probably already have a good idea of your entry pages, the pages that visitors first open when they access your site (but it’s still a good idea to verify this information with your web log analysis tool). These pages are also often called landing pages. But you may not know about your top exit pages—the last page a visitor opens in your site—shown in Webalizer in Figure 9-26.
Exit pages are significant because you may wish to make an attempt to keep traffic on your site on the top exit pages. You might want to try tinkering with the imagery or adding stronger or more subtle calls to action.
More important, studies have shown that exit pages are a particularly good place to put AdSense ads. The logic is your visitors are ready to leave your site anyhow, so they are likely to be more willing to click on a link in an ad. Therefore, it makes sense to pay special attention to your top exit pages when you tweak your AdSense content ads.
Referrers are sites that refer traffic to you. It’s good to know where your traffic is coming from. Figure 9-27 shows some top referrers for the site http://www.digitalfieldguide.com.
Note
The first entry shown in Figure 9-27, Direct Request, represents visitors who simply entered the URL for the site in their browser and didn’t come via a link from another site. If a visitor has set your site as their home page in their browser, it will also show up here.
Using information about your top referrers, you can work to strengthen your relationship with these referrers and also consider if there are other sites like a particular referrer that you might be able to approach for traffic (see Chapter 3 for advice about how to approach a site).
You can also use the top referrer list to understand the “stickiness” of your site. In other words, which pages most often refer users to other pages within your site? These referring pages that cross links represent valuable real estate that should be monetized via AdSense as extensively as possible, because they are a clue to the core interests of your user base.
Figure 9-28 shows a table of the top search strings used in search engines to find your site.
Knowing the top search strings used to find your site is extraordinarily valuable to an AdSense publisher. Honing your site to provide information relevant to these searches sets you up to benefit from a virtuous circle: more targeted information draws better search engine rankings for these queries, which in turn draw more traffic and at the same time generates better CTR because it’s easier for Google’s contextual engine to figure out what your site is about.
You should also analyze a more extensive keyword list, perhaps the top 1,000 keywords, to look for themes, meaning two and three word queries that have a recurring common word or topic. In other words, you may not get much traffic from “butterfly” but you may get a lot of traffic from many keywords containing “butterfly” or “butterflies” that only refer two or three visitors each.
As you can see, there’s a great deal of information to be had from your web log data, and it is important to keep on top of it to get the most revenue out of the AdSense program. Pay particular attention to the overall direction of traffic volume, the flow of traffic through your site via entrance and exit pages, and top referrers and search strings.
When your web log software is not enough, because you really need to understand visitor behavior in detail through your site, it’s time to turn to web analytic software such as Google Analytics and WebTrends (which also does web log analysis). These are complex software packages that may require professional assistance to implement fully. Google Analytics is free, while WebTrends requires a licensing fee.
WebTrends is available as a standalone product (you install it on your web server) or as a hosted solution. Google Analytics is only available as a hosted solution. In some cases—when your content is behind a firewall—you may need to deploy Google Urchin in addition to Google Analytics.
Note
In a hosted solution, you add a small bit of code to your pages—much in the way Google AdSense works—and the software company takes care of the rest.
This sophisticated category of software can be used to track almost everything about every visitor to your site. For example, Google Analytics will also tell you how many people bounced off your landing page, meaning they didn’t go beyond the first page of your site. If you have a high bounce-off rate, you need to know it so you can redesign your site to pull visitors in. If you link your Google Analytics and AdSense accounts, you can link this behavior back to AdSense revenue.
Note
If you are using AdWords to advertise and are selling a product, as I explain in Part III, a key feature in Google Analytics allows you to track how many visitors are converted into customers, what they buy, and even which link they clicked to make the purchase.
You’ll find more information about Google Analytics in Chapter 13.