Analyze Your Web Site Statistics

Web Tracking Summary and other user statistics

You need more than just web site statistics to be successful in Internet marketing. This article on web site traffic analysis discusses the how the overall summary page reflects your visitors' browsing habits.

The summary page should give you a very quick overview of your web site’s progress during the selected time period. To be effective, it should also be compared to some previous time period of equal length. Though finding a service that provides comparisons can be difficult. Usually, you will just be presented with tables of numbers for the current time period.

And speaking of time periods, many web statistics services default to today’s numbers displayed by hour, and beginning at midnight. In research on some of my own and my customer’s web sites, we have found this to be pretty useless information. Since we are in a global business, sales can be coming from anywhere and at any time.

If you see a dip at a certain hour, it is more likely it came from Mid-Pacific or some other sparsely populated area than from a lack of interest. Likewise, a large spike probably came from the US, since 80% of online sales come from there anyway.

A better view is given if your web stat service is able to open with a rolling 30 day period. This allows you to see your data on a day-to-day basis over a large enough time span to show meaningful changes. You should also be careful when trying to evaluate month-to-month numbers, since months vary in length. This is why I like the rolling 30 day period - it is always consistent.

You should look for the following information in the Summary Section:

Total number of pages visited
Total number of visitors
Number of New Visitors
Number of Returning Visitors
Number of Page Views per Hour
Average Amount of time spent on each page

Each of these should be shown with a trend and percentage of increase / decrease.

I’ll cover each of these in detail in the relevant sections to follow. For now, just look for overall trends in the data. If your service provides a quick trend indicator, your job will be a snap.

A graph on this page will also be a great help, since we usually understand visual information much faster and better than written.

Now let’s look at the single most important page you will want to examine. Well, maybe the second most important. We will get to the other later.