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Understanding Website Statistics |
Articles > Understanding Website Statistics Web Design Search Engines Marketing Other Articles |
This information allows website owners to better analyse the effectiveness online marketing strategies such as:
Thus giving an insight as to how to improve the website to improve return on investment. Are "Hits" everything you think they are?The majority of website owners are obsessed with the number of "hits" their website receives. Hits actually don't accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website. They represent the number of requests made for website pages, images and other files associated with viewing any single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits, and, if a single user visits many pages on the website, this visit could generate hundreds of hits. Therefore this number is not a reliable indicator of how many people have actually visited the website. If not “Hits” then what?“Visits” is the term that website owners should be concentrating on in their website statistics. Visits represent the number of unique impressions generated by their website. A unique impression measures the number of actual visitors to the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many "hits" a visitor records on a website, the website host will record one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives an accurate guide to the number of visitors a website is receiving. Daily fluctuations are normal in the number of unique visitors, but the detail to consider is the trend in the average number of visitors per month. This number should be increasing on a monthly basis. What else to look at in Website Statistics?Entry Page Statistics – show which page people are using to enter a website. Anyone typing the website address in manually will usually enter the website via the home page. The home page also often ranks the highest in search engines. Therefore most visitors will enter from the home page. No matter which page people are entering from, it is important that the website have a simple menu structure to ensure that visitors can find the information they are looking for. Exit Page Statistics - show which page visitors are leaving a website from. If a specific page seems to be losing most website visitors, then it should be reviewed to see if changes are necessary to attempt to retain more website visitors. Top Referrers - tells where the website's visitors are coming from. This is important in evaluating linking strategies, online advertising and search engine optimisation. Website owners can easily judge the effectiveness by looking to see how many visitors each marketing method is generating. Top Search Strings - tells which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for in Google and other search engines to find the website. With this information website owners can gauge the effectiveness of search engine optimisation and keywords that are being targeted. User Agents – this statistic gives information about the Browsers and Platforms (software and hardware) used by people visiting the website. Website owners should ensure that their website looks the good across all browsers and operating systems. Usage by Country – shows what country website visitors are from. This is important if the website only has appeal in a particular region. For instance, an online store that only delivers to Australia notices that 60% of website traffic is coming from the U.S. - can easily determine that they need to re-evaluate their online marketing strategies. The goal of analysing website statistics is to determine how well the website is working for its visitors. From these statistics website owners can figure out if there are any issues and test possible solutions. Problems often lie in the website's visual appearance, layout, menu structure or keyword optimisation. When making changes to a website in order to resolve issues, it's best to only make minor and gradual adjustments, and then assess the progress over the next couple of months to really understand if the changes have made an improvement. Also, it is important to remember that websites with a larger number of visitors will have more accurate website statistics. Websites with smaller numbers of visitors are more likely to have their statistics skewed by a few atypical visitors. |
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Most
website owners want to increase the number of visitors to their website,
but this can often involve spending large amounts of time and money. However,
the most useful tool in analysing website visitors is free – website
statistics. Most website owners can increase return on investment by closely
examining their website statistics. Website statistics can tell website
owners: