Know your Statistics
There is more to registering a domain name, building a web site,
uploading it and waiting for the visitors to come. It takes a lot
of promotion, both online and offline to help drive traffic to your
site. How can you tell what method of promotion is working and what
is not?
One of the most important and often overlooked sources of web site
promotion information is right under your nose. It is called a Stats
Program! The stats program, available on most web servers, can be
one of the most valuable sources of information about your visitors
and their viewing patterns. A stats program can reveal the total number
of unique sessions, page views, most and least viewed pages, entry
pages, exits pages, error pages, referrers, and more.
What do these statistics mean? First, these stats provide you, as
the website owner, with a "snapshot" of your visitors and
their viewing habits. Picture your website as a main highway with
several side roads heading in many different directions. Imagine that
each page is on a separate road with different traffic patterns. What
if you could determine which road each visitor to your site would
take? Think about these roads with billboards. What if you knew what
type of traffic would travel down each road? All these questions can
quickly be answered by reviewing the stats on your site.
Most web hosting companies keep log files for each domain on the web
server. There are several web stats programs available such as Web
Trends (http://www.webtrends.com)
to help analyze every aspect of your site. Ask your web hosting company
if stats are available for your domain.
Start analyzing your site by reviewing the stats on a daily basis.
Look for trends and patterns on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
Look for entry points and exit points. This will indicate where people
are entering your site and where they are exiting. This is important
because, if a large number of visitors are entering on a page other
than your home page, they may never see the important information.
Many search engines index more than the home page and the likelihood
of visitors entering on other pages is quite high. It is also important
to track where your visitors are exiting your site.
A good stats program will also provide valuable information such
as what "path" or roads your visitors take on a regular
basis. By knowing the path your visitors are taking, you can place
"billboards or banners" in their path. You can also change
the information on the most visited pages to include the information
you want your visitors to see. What are the least visited pages? You
may have pages of valuable information on your site that most visitors
never see. This could be due to missing or improper navigation tools.
What about "error pages"? A good stats program will allow
you to quickly locate bad links or pages with links that have been
removed.
Another good feature of the stats program is the "referrer's
information". This provides you with complete information as
to where your traffic is originating. The stats program will be able
to give you information about which search engines are sending traffic
to your site, along with the "search words" used by the
visitor. You can also track links on other sites, banner exchanges,
articles and other sources of traffic. Knowing these search words
helps determine what "keywords" are being used, and thereby
help you to determine what people are searching for when they arrived
at your site.
The stats will provide information on the amount of time people are
spending on your site, what files are being downloaded, how much bandwidth
your site is using, and even what type of browsers and operating system
your visitors are using.
Spend some quality time analyzing your stats and the information received
will help plan changes to increase the usefulness of your site. Visitors
appreciate a quality site and will often re-visit sites that are easy
to navigate, provide timely information, and don't have pages that
are not accessible or "under construction". The information
gained by analyzing the stats will save you time and money by targeting
your advertising at the type of audience viewing your site. Your banner
ads, links, keywords, and other advertising can produce much higher
quality and bring more qualified visitors to your site once you know
your visitors' viewing patterns and where they are coming from.
Useful Information Provided by most statistics software:
Ad Clicks: A click on an advertisement on a web site, which
takes a user to another site, it is referred to as an ad click.
Ad Views: A web page that presents an ad. Once the visitor
has viewed an ad, he/she can click on it (see Ad Click). There may
be more than one ad on an ad view.
Click through Rate: Percentage of users who click on a viewed
advertisement. This is a good indication of the effectiveness of this
ad.
Hit: An action on the Web site, such as when a user views
a page or downloads a file.
Page Views: Also called Page Impressions. Hit to HTML pages
only (access to non-HTML documents are not counted). Each request
for a particular web page, which displays an ad.
Referrer: URL of an HTML page that refers to your Web site.
Session: A session of activity (all hits) for one user of
a web site. A unique user is determined by the IP address or cookie.
By default, a user session is terminated when a user is inactive for
more than 30 minutes.
Visit: Commonly called User Session. All activity for one
user of a web site. By default, a user session is terminated when
a user is inactive for more than 30 minutes.
Recommended Web Server Statistics Software:
Webtrends - http://www.webtrends.com
Easystat - http://www.easystat.net
Net.Genesis - http://www.netgen.com
