What do website stats teach you?
The reason for following your web stats is to see fad and to investigate the achievement level of your advertising campaigns. The figures alone can be ambiguous, since stats packages use “hits” in particular ways. For example, if someone visits a page on a site it does not mean they read it to the end.
The point for web stats is to watch trends. Instead of seeing the digits as specific things, follow them over a period of time and decide if they are building up or lowering. Eg, if you make an online advertising campaign, look at your website stats to decide if the campaign elevated the number of visitors to your pages.
With that said, here are some figures you be looking at:
Visitor Information
There are three key areas that are necessary to inspect every few weeks and before and after every advertising campaign. The number of unique traffic will allow you to figure out whether your site is used by more or less users every month.
The location tells you what country, and occasionaly the state, visitors are from. It’s necessary if you are attentive about your global extension to other countries, or if you’ve done a marketing campaign in other areas. Remember that this is the location of the ISP where they are connected to the web.
A substantial distinction is the difference between visits versus hits. Every user that visits your site is noted as a visitor. Each time a visitor loads at a page, the page and its elements are loaded, including the scripts in the page. Eg, say a homepage has three graphics on it plus some text. This will be displayed as four parts to the page. If a visitor views that page once, your stats will display a single visit and four hits.
Daytime Activity
This area of your stats helps you to figure out what weekdays enjoy the most usage, and what part of the day is the most trafficked. This can be beneficial to decide when best to schedule webinars and shows. Ie, if Thursdays at 4p.m. are well-used periods for your site, they may be well-used periods for teleclasses. It’s critical to remember that the most popular periods for people to surf the web is mid-week after lunch.
Referring websites
This part of your web statistics will show you which sites are sending traffic to your website. It shows which search engines users utilise, as well as which keywords or phrases people type in to find your site. As well as that, this part will also detail what other sites are linking from their site to your site.
Webpages
This aspect of your stats will allow you to determine what pages are visited most frequently, how long people stay on a page (presumably to read it), and what page people exit your site from. Again, trends make more sense here rather than the actual figures.
Error reporting
This aspect displays to you on which pages users had problems accessing your web site. If users attempt to access a particular page and cannot, it will be recorded here. If a web site has been down, you can see these charts grow.
Afterward
You can see, there are a great many figures to comprehend in your web statistics, and a lot of ways to decode them. If you read them as trends and problems, and less thought to specific figures, you will be on top of your game!