Top 10 Tips on Using Web Site Statistics
Site statistics are one of the most useful tools for measuring and understanding the performance of your Web site. Typically, Web site statistics provide a detailed report on the performance of a Web site, which can be analysed on a daily and monthly basis (the level and type of reporting will differ between programmes).
Site statistics reporting generally includes (but is not limited to) the following aspects:
- Unique visitors — Number of individuals / unique computers' browsers who have visited your Web site (only counted once).
- Number of visits — Total number of distinct visits to your Web site (starting with an entry click and ending with an exit click).
- Pages viewed per visit — Number of Web pages viewed through a browser by a person.
- Hits — A hit is a request from a browser for a single item from a Web server, so in order for a Web browser to display one page containing three graphics, four hits would occur at the server (one for the HTML page and three for the graphics).
- Bandwidth used — Amount of data transferred.
- Visits Duration — The amount of time that people are staying on your site.
- Referring URLs — The pages that people visit prior to coming to your Web site / page (these may be external Web sites including search engines).
- Search Phrases — The keyword phrases or keywords people are using to get to your Web site via search engines.
Here are our top 10 tips to ensure you're getting the most out of your site stats:
- Check you can both easily retrieve and understand the data generated by your statistics programme.
- Check you are using the same method of measurement over time in order to produce results that are the most useful for purposes of comparison (i.e. don't switch between statistics programmes and expect the results to be consistent).
- Check that you are consistently tracking the right set of results. If you're keeping an eye on the number of unique visitors, don't switch to tracking hits because your results will get skewed.
- Hits are not the same as visits! If you want to know how many people are visiting your site, look at the number of unique visits or visitors, not hits.
- Record your statistics in a spreadsheet or database not provided by your Web host. This is especially important if your online statistical data is limited to recording a set number of months and you want to track your site's performance over a number of years.
- Remember that whilst statistics reports are unlikely to ever be 100% accurate, the measurement of trends is still very useful.
- Use statistical data in conjunction with other sources of information about your business performance to flesh out the 'real' picture.
- Use your statistics to help you improve the stickiness of your site, which as the name suggests means getting your site visitor to stay on your site for longer and encouraging them to come back again.
- Look at your conversion rate together with your site statistics. It may be whilst the number of visits to your site remains fairly consistent the quality of your visits has improved, i.e. your site is getting visited by people genuinely interested in what your site is offering.
- If you haven't started tracking your site's performance, why not start now? Schedule in a regular time slot, at least once a month, to review and record your stats.
Site statistics programmes are generally provided by a hosting service. If your site is hosted by Avatar you will have site statistics, which are easily accessible. (If you don't know how to access your site statistics, contact your host).
If you would like us to have a look at your statistics as part of an In-Depth Site Marketing Review, then please contact us.
