Firstly, don’t panic. It doesn’t mean your traffic has actually dropped – it’s just that these different tools use different methods to measure your traffic. Logfile analyzers like AwStats look at the actual activity on your server and track the downloads of every single file – full pages, images, PDFs, scripts and so on. Google Analytics uses a tiny piece of Javascript on each page and tracks opens of full pages from visitors browsers.

Here are some factors that can make the results from these systems different:

• Robots (like Googlebot) don’t run Javascript so these visits won’t show up in Google Analytics
• Browsers cache website pages (i.e. keep a local copy on the computer) so they don’t always have to download pages that visitors read often. If this happens the web page view won’t show up at all on a log file (AwStats). Google Analytics can track the page view though because it runs on the browser
• Some browsers have Javascript disabled so Google won’t track any website visits
• Some visitors will have security software that stops Google working

There are pros and cons to each approach and I won’t confuse you with the detail (leave a comment or ask me if you’d like an explanation though!)

The basic message is that Google Analytics probably will show you a smaller number of visitors (maybe even a lot smaller). Many of these missed visits will be from automatic bots that are out there on the net crawling and indexing your site. You probably shouldn’t really care about them anyway, unless you’re worried about your site being indexed.

If you want some proof of this, take a look at a log file from a typical day of activity. Your internet host should provide these for you. Take a look through for robots (try a search for ‘bot’) – you may be surprised how often these visits happen.

Part of the answer is to check in with your affiliate (or their provider) and look at your impressions, clicks and sales. But this is only part of the answer.

To get the complete picture you need to use your web analytics tool to track some key things on your site:

1. Page views on the pages with the affiliate links
2. How visitors navigated to these pages
3. Clicks on the links through to the affiliate sites

Why do you need to check these too? I knew you’d ask.

Page views should be approximately the same as the impressions reported by your affiliate. Hopefully your affiliate will report a higher number of impressions as visitors return to their site with the same cookie set. It certainly should not be less – this could be a sign that your tracking code is wrong

Navigation to these pages is useful to know because you want to know where visitors come from and which referrers are working for you. Your web analytics tool should be able to show which is the most successful, whether it’s organic search (Google etc) or direct referrers.

It’s good to start tracking the clicks out of your site. If you don’t track them they will just be reported as exits by your web analytics system. This will give you a terrible click through rate and make your efforts seem worthless! You can add tracking to your outbound links using Javascript onclick functions, or you can insert your own gateway pages that have their own tracking code.

If you can get started with these metrics then you can start to really understand your traffic and what it is doing for you.

Otherwise you’re just working in the dark…

Lots of web site owners have theories about their site:

• it gets lots of hits
• I get a lot of traffic from Squidoo
• I’m not selling very much

My message here is don’t rely on hunches. Make sure you measure your website. Use a good measurement tool like Google Analytics. Otherwise, how do you know if your site is successful? How do you know where your visitors come from? What do they do while they are on your site, and where do they leave?

Most importantly, do they take the actions that you want them to take (buy a product, sign up for a newsletter, click on an affiliate Ad, etc.)?

Once you what your visitors are up to, you can make some changes to make your site more useful.

Of course the saying really means that once you cut into your expensive piece of brazilian mahogany, its impossible to go back. No changes allowed. This is different to a website, where you can keep going back and changing it at any time (unless your designer charges by the hour)…