Visitor statistics - hit or myth?

How to get the best return from your online marketing investment

Your website generates huge log files containing vast amounts of data about each and every event on your website. It is the job of a programme called a log analyser to make sense of this data to provide you with an overview of what's happening with your website.

Most small businesses do not review their website log files because they are too complicated and provide erroneous data. That's a shame, because the only way to get a good return from your online marketing investment is by finding out exactly what's going on with your website and making use of that knowledge to improve your content and tune up your marketing.

Having a great website design will not bring in the business unless your content is right and people that need your product or service visit your site.

Hit or myth?

One of the biggest myths surrounding websites is the question of "hits". How many times have you heard of websites getting so many thousand "hits" a day? Sounds good - but it's completely meaningless. A "hit" is recorded every time a web page or other object (such as a graphic) is viewed. So, to impress people with your "hits" just add a hundred little pictures to all your pages, then every time that page is viewed you score 101 hits!

Our statistics do not measure hits, they only measure visitors and page views.

 

Useful marketing information or "analysis paralysis"?

Traditional log analyser programmes compete with one another to provide more and more detailed analyses of your website's log files. Do you really want (or have the time) to wade through the intricacies of each and every file that gets downloaded from your site? Probably not. It's better to have a clear, concise and unambiguous picture of what your website is doing for your business.

Our stats provide two pages (yes, that's all there is):

The Overview page:

• How many unique visitors and how many pages per visitor - this information is provided for the whole of the selected period, for each day in the period and by day of the week.
• For each page you can see the total number of "unique viewings", a daily average for the period and the percentage of visitors that chose to view that page.
• Referrer - that shows you if they came from a link on another website, e.g. a search engine.
• Querystring - this is an optional bit of text that you can put after your web address, e.g. you might use the address mywebsite.co.uk/?google in adverts you place on google, you can then see exactly how many people came to your site from that advert.
  
  With so many internet marketing scams around, you need to be able to verify results yourself quickly and easily.
• Search term - this is what people have typed into a search engine to find your site (invaluable!)

The Detail page:

Select one day to get a fully detailed trace of every visitor to your site. A separate listing is shown for each individual visitor and shows you where they came from, the querystring (see above), and what they typed into a search engine. It also provides times, so you can get a feel for how long people are staying on each page.

This provides qualitative information about real visitor behaviour and can provide useful insights. For example, if you find that some visitors spend time flicking between two pages you may surmise that the pages lack clear clues as to where they should go next. 

 

The knowledge you need

How many people went your website?

Most log analysers do not differentiate between real people visiting your site and the myriad of robots and crawlers or other internet "noise" that can throw a big spanner in your statistics. Our stats use cookies on your website, which means that we only log visits by real people looking at your website.

We use cookies to identify individual visitors rather than the usual method of counting sessions. This means we don't log where a person comes to your site and then comes back within the same day.

Which pages are people interested in?

It's a good idea to regularly purge your site of pages that people don't look at - they may just be cluttering the place up. Let your visitors decide what they want to look at and concentrate on developing the most popular content.

Is your advertising bringing the right sort of people to your site?

An important measurement is the number of pages viewed by each visitor, because it indicates whether people find your content relevant to their needs. If you spend money on advertising you will expect to get people to your website, but if the stats show that they only look at one page you are probably wasting your money. Generally, if the average number of pages that your visitors look is high it shows that the advertising is bringing in the right sort of people. Keep an eye on this figure over time and see how it correlates to your marketing activities.

What do people type into a search engine to find your website?

With our stats you get a list of the phrases people typed into search engines to find your site.

This can be very illuminating. For example, with our own site we found that very few visitors typed in "content management" or "updateable website" and we realised that very few non-technical people used these terms. That led us to put these terms on the back seat and instead emphasise "website design" and other similar phrases.

A regular review of these keywords and phrases allows you to mould your website content so that search engines will give you a higher ranking for the terms your potential customers actually type in, rather than the ones you think they might use. In this way you can benefit enormously from the free traffic that can be generated from the major search engines.

How did people get to your site?

Did they type in the web address or did they come from another site? If you are getting links from another website it's nice to know so that you can thank them. If you are paying for advertising (we recommend Google Adwords by the way), you need to know exactly how many visitors you are getting for your money.

It is worth regularly monitoring referrers (that's the website your visitor linked from) to see how much free traffic you are getting to your website from search engines.

Want to know about spiders, crawlers and robots?

No? We thought not. That's why our stats only log real visits by real people.

Most web site statistics cannot differentiate between a real person looking at your site and any of the vast army of automated devices that constantly trawl the internet. This "internet noise" can render regular stats meaningless and throw a spanner into your online marketing plans.

A reality fix

Compared to other log analysers, our stats may paint a gloomy picture. But we figure you would rather know what's really going on and use that knowledge to develop and grow your website to help improve your bottom line profits.

 

Click here for the "I Need Hits" search engine submission service (affiliate)