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How to analyze your website statistics
Whilst it is really admirable that you have even arrived on this page and are taking the time to learn more about website statistics (stop that yawning now!), please don't forget that we are experienced professionals and look at website statistics day in, day out for a living (and yes, we get kicks out of it). You see we see trends, can pick up dark spots and generally suggest strategies that could grow your website statistics exponentially.
We can do this for you via a free no-obligation 15 minute website analysis over the phone, or a full-blown website assessment where we provide you with a report on where your website is standing up and being counted, and where it's on shaky ground.
Contact us to arrange your free 15 minute website analysis today!
Unique Users
When you are looking at your statistics, one of the first things you should look for is ‘unique visitors'. Your statistic software will track the IP address of all your visitors as to recognise the difference between somebody that has been to the site before, and somebody visiting for the first time.
If you and you only were to go visit your own website 100 times in a day, then your ‘number of visits' would show 100 and ‘unique visitors' would show only 1. Therefore, from a marketing perspective, ‘unique visitors' are more important. While monitoring ‘number of visitors' does have its advantages (like knowing that some customers are returning to the site from time to time), ‘unique visitors' indicates that the website is growing. This might be due to offline marketing efforts promoting the website but in most cases will be reflective of your SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
However be aware that dial-up visitors (which are now on the decrease) get a new IP each time they log on so you can have the same person visit different times and give a unique hit.
Number of Visits – The number of visits are the total number of visits by all visitors over a given period of time. If I visit your site and then come back 4 more time you should see one Unique visit and 5 visits from me.
Pages – This is the total number of pages viewed by visitors. This does not include images, java script or CSS and the like. Just HTML and CGI type files.
Hits - This is every file requested by the visitor. This includes pages and images together. If you have a page with 2 images calling a java script file the page will generate a total of 4 hits. The most common referenced stat used and one that is virtually meaningless (and useless). The more appropriate numbers to consider are both 'number of visitors' and 'unique visitors' (see above).
Bandwidth – The total number of bytes downloaded. If you have a page that has 50 KB of text, 2 images at 24 and 32 KB then each visitor to that page will take 106 KB of your bandwidth. AWStats then gives you this information for the year so far as well as a 30 and 7 day perspective. Finally it gives it to you by the hour.
Next is Visitors Domains/Countries (Top 25)*. This shows you what countries your visitors are coming from, starting with the most and working its way down.
* All categories with a Top 10 or 25 have a link to the right of the category that can give you an entire list if there are more than 10 or 25.
Following this is the Hosts Top 25. This gives you a breakdown of the top individual visitors to your site.
Robots/Spider Top 25 visits This area gives you a great insight into when your favorite search engine has last visited your site as well as how many hits it has made (again, 'hit' can be misleading here).
Visits Duration Here you can tell how long visitors are staying on your site. The figure you see here needs to be relative to your site. Are you a content-heavy site encouraging people to stay on and browse for as long as possible? Then you might be gunning for people staying on your website for at least a few minutes, if not longer. Are you really just a 'shop front' with the core aim for people to grab your contact details and call you? Well then less than a minute might be quite acceptable. Are you an online store and have you timed an average transaction to be around 2-3 minutes in duration? Then if your website statistics are showing different results, you may need to consider why this is and how you can change it.
Files/Type lets you see what files are generating the most hits.
Top 25 Pages The URL or web address gives you the most visited pages on your site. This provides extremely valuable feedback on how your site is performing. Are the most popular pages the ones you would expect and hope perform well?
Top 10 Operating Systems This shows what Operating Systems your visitors are using in order of popularity. This statistic is generally only of minor interest to most users, however can show interesting trends over time, which may be cause for a redesign should you see big shifts from one system to another that perhaps your site is not currently configured for.
Top 10 Browsers. Like the above category above, this shows what browsers your visitors are using in order of popularity. This statistic is generally only of minor interest to most users, however can show interesting trends over time, which may be cause for a redesign should you see big shifts from one system to another that perhaps your site is not currently configured for.
Direct Address/Bookmark. This is the number of visitors that either know the name of your site or have it bookmarked. Whilst it is good to know people have book-marked you or do know your direct website address, whether this is a good result for you will depend on whether you are gunning for loyalty and repeat business, or are more in the market for 'newbies'.
Links from a newsgroup Is just that. You don't have to get links just from search engines, they can come from newsgroups too!
Links from an Internet Search Engine Gives us a listing of the number of visitors coming from any given search engine.
Links from Other Web Pages shows what pages your visitors are coming from. This does not mean there is a link to your site on the listed page; it just registers where the visitor was coming from.
Links from an Internal Page Self explanatory and Unknown is just that, not known.
Top 10 key phrases As the title suggests, these are the top 10 combinations of keywords that people used to find your site. Do they reflect what you want to be found for? If not, talk to us.
Top 25 key words As the title suggests, these are the top 10 single key words that people used to find your site. Do they reflect what you want to be found for? If not, talk to us.
The last two are Miscellaneous and HTTP Error codes. These give miscellaneous information and what HTTP codes are given to your visitors.
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