Video segment 3 of 12 - click here to watch the full video.

By entering an extended date range I'll display the last years worth of data. Ok, my traffic was growing, but here I notice a significant drop off in November. That's because we re-designed our site and changed the way we display our URLs. We knew this would hurt us for a while in the search engines, but we hoped it would ultimately improve things--and it looks like it's happening since our traffic is now up quite a bit.

And my page views are increasing as well, that means when people get to the site they're sticking around awhile. By the way, these spikes came from a hacker who was trying to mess with our site. When I saw this report it clued me in to the hacker and our system administrator was able to turn away these malicious hits.

Overall this looks good. But there's still a lot more to discover.


So far we've looked at overall stats. But not all of my pages perform equally. What I'd like to know is which pages are viewed most--Let's take a look at the Pages & Files report.

Here are the most accessed pages in my site. Usually, the home page (represented by a "/" ) tops the list. But because of that hacking attempt, the Content Management page (which was the target of the hack) is at the top. I don't want these hack attempts to slant my percentages so I'll use Urchin's filtering tool to remove this page from the list.

When reviewing a website's traffic reports there are usually a few "pages" that can be ignored. For example, the robots.txt is a system file that tells search engine spiders what to do, but it's invisible to visitors so I just ignore it. And in our case the search page gets lots of traffic. That's because when we redesigned our site, and changed all our web addresses, we knew we'd get lot's of 404 errors--that's the page not found error--so we set our 404 page to go to our search page so that visitors could easily look for the content that had been moved. Now I notice that because my date range is still set to the past year I'm seeing our old pages in this list. I'll change the report's date range to a point after we launched the new site to remove these old pages.

Ok. Aside from the home page, my portfolio and pricing pages are among my top performers. After that my newsletter content is getting a lot of activity. Let's take a look the one I wrote about RSS feeds. Clicking this chart icon shows how this page performed over time. Looks like I had a big boost around March. That's because I began running an AdWords campaign to promote my newsletters--looks like its generating some good activity.   next >