Tracking traffic levels on a regular basis allows you to examine traffic trends, and lets you see whether work you have done has had a quantifiable effect on the customers that are brought to a website.

However, reviewing traffic levels on a monthly basis can be frustrating. Don't get me wrong, I do think that this is a good time period to review traffic levels, as it allows you to break down a years traffic into 12 roughly evenly sized groups. This allows the traffic to be a substantial (hopefully) figure, and you can see whether those increased rankings over the course of the last 4/5 weeks have turned into traffic.

The flaw in this system, is February, at least when its not a leap year. Some of the websites I manage have seen a miniscule drop in traffic, and if I were to evaluate that traffic on a daily basis, I would likely find in most cases that traffic has actually increased slightly. I know that it is only 2 days shorter than most months, but this is about 6% (maths was done in my head so don't quote me on it) and I suspect that the average traffic drop for these campaigns was 2-4%.

However, all is not completely bad, as if my work continues to be successful March should appear as a bumper month when compared to the Februarys traffic levels!