One of the keys to a profitable web site is analyzing your hits to visitor ratio. What does it mean if you have a low hit to visitor ratio? This article provides the answer

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An effective means for analyzing web site traffic is to look at the number of hits per visitor for a time period. To do this, you simply divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for the time period in question. Time periods can be a day, week, month or quarter of a year. Dont look at any time smaller than a day as the data may not create an accurate picture of the traffic.

Assume you have the best damn dang hair net site on the net. You have over 1,000 hair nets of every variation, color, material and weave. For those of you not in the know, a hair net is one of those things people working in fast food places have to wear. I have no idea why, but I am sure there was a lawsuit once that makes complete and total sense.

Anyway, a site with over 1,000 hair nets should have a massive number of pages. Logically, every visitor to the site should click through more than a few pages while looking for the perfect specimen. Unfortunately, you find the server stats tell a different story.

In reviewing server stats, you learn that on average the site receives 5,000 visitors a day and 10,000 hits. Dividing hits by visitors, you discover to your dismay each visitor is looking at only two pages on average. This information is supported by the fact youre only averaging a few sales a day. Aye, Carumba!

There are a few possible reasons for this poor performance:

1. Slow Site: A site with 1,000 products is going to require a very careful database design. I would guess 70 percent of database sites are fatally slow. By fatally, I mean they load so slowly that most dial-up users cant navigate in the site. We are talking 30 to 40 second page load times. If you have this problem, you are immediately losing the 45 percent of people using dial-up.

2. Click Fraud: If you are running a PPC campaign, you must track the clicks in the campaign. A low hit to visitor ratio can often mean your PPC ads are being artificially clicked as such clickers rarely venture into the internal pages of a site.

3. Poor Advertising: This one is purely your fault. Your advertising must focus on keywords that are relevant to your site. If you are selling hair nets, dont place ads under hair styling. If you do, people will click your ad, see hair nets and immediately leave. Know your limitations!

There can be a variety of reasons for low hit to visitor ratios. More often than not, slow load times are the answer. If the site is fast, then you need to dig deeper so you can figure out a way to make your visitors do the same.