How to Report Traffic on the Web

Website traffic is a measurement of the number of visitors to a website and an analysis of various statistics regarding those visitors. This can include comparison to other sites, or to previous time periods. A good way to report all of this numerical data is to use tables and graphs.

Step 1

Report the number of visitors each day, week or month. Depending on the way you want to track the data, you can show daily visitors for the past week, a graph showing the number of visitors each day for a month, or the number of weekly or monthly visitors over the course of a year or more. Data for a week's worth of visitors can be displayed using a bar graph, while any more than seven periods of time would be displayed better with a line graph.

Step 2

Compare your site's Alexa rank to competing sites. Display this in the form of a numerical chart or a bar graph. To show your site in a good light, pick some competitors with lower Alexa rankings. To show you have room to grow, show some sites with higher rankings.

Step 3

Analyze the visitors. Report how many in a given time period are first-time visitors and how many are repeat visitors. Compare which search engines or other referring sites are directing your visitors to your site. Pie charts are good for both of these statistics.

Step 4

Tell how many pages the average visitor views each time they visit, and which pages are most popular. Rank various pages in your site as to which are most popular as entry pages and which are most likely to be the last page a visitor views before leaving (known as the exit page). Both of these would work well as bar graphs or just a table of numeric data. When ranking the most popular pages, put them in numeric order with the most popular first. Locate your visitors by state or country and, if applicable, by language. This type of data can be displayed in a pie graph.

Step 5

Categorize information about the visitor's computers. Pie charts are good for this because you are analyzing the percentage of the whole number of visitors. Your web developers may want to know things such as what percentage of visitors use each of the popular web browsers, what operating systems they have, the resolution size of their monitors and the percentage who have various browser plug-ins.

Step 6

Show a visual report of average traffic for each hour of the day, if you have a busy website. This kind of data can be helpful for e-commerce sites that rely on quick turn-around for sales. It can be helpful to know what time of day you are likely to get the largest number of sales, or when customers are sending requests for support, so the staff is available at that time. A bar graph or a line graph would work well for this.

Step 7

List keywords in order of popularity. This data is best displayed as a list with numeric data. Sort the list with the most popular keywords at the top, decreasing to those that are not as popular.

References

• WebsiteTrafficReport: Web Analytics FAQ
• Google Analytics: Enterprise-class features delivered on Google's world-class platform
• SiteTrafficStats: Website Traffic Reports

About the Author

Melissa Worcester is a mom, freelance writer and graphic designer. She has been writing professionally for over 18 years and earning a part-time income writing for various websites since 2007. She writes about technology issues, business and marketing, home improvement, education and family topics and assists in her husband's home remodeling business. Worcester has a Bachelor of Arts in communications and psychology from Syracuse University.