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Analyze Your Web Site Statistics
Visitor Tracking and other user statistics
Your free hit counter or free web counter may not include
all the necessary data to give you a complete picture of your web
site performance.
In tracking Visitors across your website, you must be able to not
only distinguish unique and returning visitors, you need to be able
to compare the data across time periods. You also need to measure
percentages of change so that you can measure your progress in optimizing
your web pages.
The Visitors Page should show you the following:
Total Visitors
New Visitors
Returning Visitors
Pages Per Visit
Visits Per Day
Average Time Per Visit
Visitor Detail Page
The visitor the most important element in your web analysis arsenal
and is the basis for all of the other website statistics. Without
visitors, you get nothing: No hits, no data, no sales and NO Income!
All other data are, or should be, tied to the visitor so you will
know how they use your site. By this we mean that you should be
able to see where each visitor came into your site, where they came
from and where they went while they were there. You should also
be able to tell how long they spent on each page.
Your web site traffic statistics service should distinguish between
New Visitors and Returning Visitors. This is very important. It
helps you determine how effective you are in getting new visitors,
and how well you retain them. This is often referred to as ‘stickiness’.
It is a vital element in sales tracking as well, but we will get
to that later.
You can compare the Total Visitors – the combination of both
New and Returning Visitors - for the current period against the
previous period to get an idea as to the overall direction of your
business. (A good service will provide this information as part
of the package.)
If your visitors are broken into New and Returning Visitors as
they should be, you get a very good feel for their attitudes about
your site. If you get a lot of new visitors, but few returning visitors,
then your site content probably needs to be made more appealing.
Of course, you must also give your visitors a reason to come back,
so pay attention to content.
If, on the other hand, your new visitor numbers are falling, your
marketing plans are most likely off target, since you are not appealing
to the right crowd. Fire your Marketing Guru. If you are the Marketing
Guru, fire yourself and get someone else to rework your marketing
strategy. Never be afraid to admit that you don't know everything.
Pages per Visitor
This item will tell you how well your visitors use your site. Increasing
the number of pages per visitor shows that your potential customers
are finding more relevant content. If it begins to rise, you are
on track and sales should also begin to rise. If they don’t,
then look for signs of trouble in your content or purchasing process.
You would be surprised how many people abandon the site because
they find the purchasing process to difficult, confusing or time
consuming.
Visits Per Day
This number smoothes out the visits for the time period being studied.
There may be a wide variation from day to day in your numbers and
'Visits Per Day' gives you a way to compare traffic for different
time periods.
Time Per Visit
The amount of time spent on your site is another good indicator
of how well received your site is. It may not tell you much if it
is not increasing, but it will certainly be an early indicator of
falling interest. This will probably be one of the first warning
signs of visitors losing interest in your site, so pay close attention
to it.
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