3 Things you ought to know about your Website:

  1. Is anyone visiting my website?
  2. Where are your site visitors coming from?
  3. What are visitors doing, once they are on your site?

Once you know these answers you can make informed decisions about your website's performance and how it can be improved.

Is anyone visiting my website?

Have people visited my website and, if so how many? This is the most basic question about your website that you'll want answered.

The most basic tool to answer this question is the hit counter."Hits" were originally the standard by which web traffic was judged, but are now out of date. They fell out of favour as a hit happens each time that a server sends an object (page, graphics, animation etc.). Thus one page with twenty images would generate 21 hits for each visitor.

Another common counter is a visitor counter. These are better than the hit counters, however they commonly have a serious limitation: If I visit your site 5 times today, I am counted as 5 separate visitors. This results in seriously inflated visitation data.

What You Need:

If you are thinking of getting your first website setup, a website statistics package should be an essential element on your shopping list. Web statistics (sometimescalled a website analytics package) enable a website owner to see how your website is performing and how people are interacting with it. If you already own a website, your website host should be able to help you get access to your statistics. 

Your website statistics should:

  • Measure Unique Visitors: The best measurement of people visiting your website.
    Unlike Hits & Visitor counters, unique visitors counts each individual computer viewing the site each month. This provides a real understanding of how many people are actually connecting with your site in a month.
  • Help Identify Trends Over Time
  • Be password protected: Statistics contain sensitive information especially about where your visitors come from, and shouldn't be freely available to competitors.

mcWebs includes all of this information in it's regular Performance Reporting.

Where are your site visitors coming from?

The second essential key thing to know is where your visitors are coming from. There are three major source categories of visitors to your website: 1) Direct 2) Referral Links 3) Search Engines.

Direct Visitors are people who may have seen your domain name on business cards, flyers, signage or in an newspaper advertisement. They find your site by directly typing in your domain name into their internet browser.

Referral Links: Website statistics provide a list of sites which link (and refer visitors) to your website. This will help you make more intelligent marketing decisions. If you spend money advertising your site online your statistics will show you how effective that money is. For example advertising on the online yellowpages.com.au can include a link to our website.

Statistics quantify the number of visitors to your website from Links and allows you to calculate how much each visitor costs if it came from Online Marketing allowing you to figure out how effective it is for your business.

Reputation Management: You are not in control of who links to your website. Website statistics will alert you to a forum or blog post where people may be discussing (either positively or negatively) your company. You will be then aware of the discussion.

Search Engines are the most common way people find your website (if they don't know your domain exactly). Website statistics will tell you how many visitors arrived at your site from search engines like Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

Website statistics can even see what search phrases people use to find you. This can be used to give you:

  • an indication of what phrases you are ranking well for.
  • help you identify what search phrases are missing, giving you opportunities for search engine optimisation (SEO) and keyword research for PPC marketing.
  • Improve the site by making sure that the phrase that linked a client to your site is actually answered by your website content.

What are visitors doing, once they are on your site?

Finally, once you know how many visitors and how they found you, you might like to know what they are doing on your website.

  • How long are they staying on your website?
  • Are they visiting the home page and leaving straight away?

(The bounce rate is calculated from the number of exit / number of entry ... in this example (41/111) = 37%)

  • How much of the site are they looking at?
  • What pages are they looking and what are the most popular pages?
  • Are visitors returning to my website?

Conclusion:

With website statistics you are more educated about what is happening with your website. This information can be used to identify how well your marketing is working, quantify what content is working and what isn't, and generally create a better user experience for people using your website.

This should translate into a competitive advantage for your website which results in better results for your business.