Everybody loves statistics, right? Each of your websites is quietly compiling dozens of great statistics for you to review during your quiet evenings. As with any good marketing effort, it is essential to understand who is seeing your message and how they are responding. A quick look at a website’s statistics can help.
Here's a brief guide to help you make sense of each statistic:
Unique Visits is a count that represents a unique person visiting on your site. This is sometimes referred to as the number of sessions.
Total Pages represents the number of pages visited. Total Pages divided by Unique Visits will show the average number of pages viewed per visit. You want to see people visiting multiple pages on your website – not just one. If your average is close to one, either you are fulfilling their need in a single page or something is causing them to leave quickly.
Note: Don’t get distracted with the number of Hits to your website. Hits are a count of all requests to your website, including images, HTML files, etc. One visitor to your website could represent 30 or more hits.
Entry & Exit Pages indicate where people start & end a visit to your website. Does everyone ‘quit’ on a certain page? Are lots of people missing the home page? One of our clients has 40% of their visitors entering the website on pages other than the home page.
Referring Site shows the URL of another site where a user clicked a link to get to your site. This is great information to understand how people find your website.
Search Word Report will indicate the most common words typed into a search engine that resulted in your site being found
Google has a solution called Analytics that is designed to collect statistics about your website. It is free and can be easily added to any website. The software provides some great visual tools and information to help you understand your statistics.
It takes effort, but spending some time in your statistics will help you get the most out of your website and is a great way to gauge the response to your online efforts.
Copyright © 2008 The NW Horse Source, LLC
Top of Page
|
