Analyze web site traffic and statistics from search engines

Posted on August 24, 2007 at 7:11 am

If you’ve ever looked, there are literally hundreds of web sites out there that you can use to monitor and analyze traffic to your web site or blog, but some are definitely better than other. Google Analytics is by far the most popular with tons of statistics, graphs, charts, and maps. Using Analytics, you can see the average time spent on the site, most popular pages, traffic sources, geographic location of visitors, and most popular keywords.

However, since Google Analytics is well-rounded and has many different features, there are some other traffic monitoring tools that can give you more detailed and focused information than Analytics. One of these tools is 103bees, a free real-time online analytics tool that focuses on natural search engine traffic analysis. And that’s all it does, so it does it very well. In Analytics, you can get a list of popular keywords and how many visits each keyword brought, but with 103bees, you can actually see the entire questions visitors asked before they reached your site.

Using 103bees, you can get detailed statistics on targeted keywords and search terms that drive traffic to your site from search engines. Using the stats, you can optimize your optimize existing content and anchor text, discover new keywords to target, and generate new ideas from researching questions.

It’s very easy to sign up with 103bees and you only have to copy one line of Javascript code into the template file for your web site. The cool thing is that 103bees is free for any web site with less than 100,000 visits per month! However, if you’re above that, it’s only $5 a month, a very cheap price for the data!

Once you’re logged in and after a few days, 103bees will have enough traffic to generate charts and statistics. The first thing you see is an overview of the last 7 or 30 days of traffic, whether it’s natural, referral or paid.

Clicking on your project will bring up on the left the list of reports that can be run, including latest search hits, top landing pages, top keywords, long tail, rankings, latest questions, and top questions.

I find the last two reports the most useful because you can see exactly what people were search for and it’s a great way to find blog topics to write about:

As you can see from above, people coming to my blog were searching on converting images, connecting laptop to TV, how to use YSlow, how to detect open ports, etc. If I don’t have an article written on something here, that’s a new blog post that I know people are searching for!

Another very useful report is Rankings, which let’s you see which phrases rank in the first 10 results in Google, from 11 to 20, 20 to 30, and so on.

Click on Phrases and you can see which keywords for your site ranked in the top 10 results. This is great because now you can check and see which keywords are too competitive for you and which ones you can use to rank higher. For example, I’m ranking between position 20 and 30 for keywords like iPhone backgrounds, so that’s probably not something I would want to write about again.

Lastly, you can also see from which search engines you are getting your traffic from by clicking on the Search Engines report. For most people, it’s mostly Google, but you can also see exactly which country the search is being performed from:

Clicking on Phrases, again, will give you the search terms for each specific location. This can help target keywords for specific regions of the world, etc. 103bees also has a feature whereby you can have a daily, weekly, etc report sent to you containing top keywords and search phrases automatically.

Overall, it’s a great analytics tool to complement Google Analytics with it’s focus on natural search engine stats. Definitely give it a shot, even if it’s just to see the questions!

[tags]search traffic analysis, analyze web site traffic, traffic monitoring, web site statistics, tracking web site traffic, analyze search engine traffic[/tags]

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