23 November 2005
By - Deryck Harlick
Many people use website statistics packages to get an understanding of how many visitors are looking at there website. There are many website statistics packages out there, quite often the package you will be using is dictated to by who you host your website with.
For most users the important thing to know is the number of visitors and how these visitors are getting to your website. I am going to simply explain the main figures you should be looking for when looking at your statistics and try and put to bed some myths. I’ll also show you a couple of tips for you to monitor your visitors’ behaviour when they visit your site.
Visitors not Hits
The most significant statistic you should look at is the number of VISITORS that have looked at your site in a selected period (some stats packages refer to this as sessions) – a common misconception it to look at the number of HITS. Hits show the number of items that have been downloaded from the server so someone can look at a page – with pages containing several (and sometimes hundreds) of items this stats is misleading – quite often you will hear people boasting that they have received 100,000 hits on there website in the last month – in reality the number of visitors to that site would be significantly lower that that.
What pages are important to you?
Most stats packages will give figures against how many times a certain page has been viewed. This is useful when you want to find out if visitors are looking at the information you want them to see.
Quite often the more interesting figure is when a page isn’t being looked at, this is especially true when it is a page that is important to your marketing. This can indicate that visitors are not finding that information. If the page is one that you want your visitors to get to then you should review where it is placed on your website – do you need to go through pages of information before the link is displayed? Is the link to the page prominent and easy to find? Do you have to scroll down the screen before the link is displayed.
Webstats are not just a means to see how well (or not) your website is performing. Analysis of these statistics in a structured manor can help you identify where you need to improve on your website.
If you would like any help on understanding you website statistics, or you have no statistics and want to set them up for your website then please contact me, Deryck Harlick on 0191 211 1955