Site Statistics - The Basics
mkLINK Internet Marketing Tips(Thursday 20 July 2006)

Question:
How do you know how successful your website is if you don't measure?
Why play cricket without bothering to keep the score?

Did you realize you can discover...(?)

• Where your visitors are coming from - geographically.
• What time of day or night they visited you
• Who referred them to your site.
• What search words they used to find you.
• How many times those keywords were used to find you
• Which pages they looked at.
• Which Pages they left your site
• Whether they come back later or not.
• Which browser they are using.
• Loads, Loads More...
  

You see, virtually all site-owners have just a vague idea of how many visitors they
have on (say) a daily basis.

That's a bit like just having one gauge on your car
- just to measure the temperature for example!

Once you know at least the basics of website analytics, you can really start to
increase the conversion of your site - often for zero or little cost
- just by adjusting a few words here or links there!

So, Lets Clear up Some Confusion.
Here's a few terms...

Visitors

A 'visit' is a single visit to your website by one person. Forget how many pages of
your site they view - its still just one visit.
If that person comes back a day later - that's another visit. If you have just one
person(the same person) looking at your website each day for a month
- that'd be 30 visits - but just ONE UNIQUE VISIT - get it?
Generally the more unique visitors the better and loads of plain visits mean people
keep coming back...

Hits
This is subject to a lot of confusion! Also, rules vary here
- but this will serve for this primer...
A hit occurs every time a file is downloaded from your website. So, If you have a
website with loads of images and stuff - that represents loads of hits - even if the
visitor just visits one page.

Say they just visit the home-page - (which itself is a file), which has say 3 different
graphics - that's a total of 4 hits. Make sense?
Other files could be backround sounds, FLASH movies, audio - etc etc.

Page Views
These simply how many pages were ‘viewed’ by UNIQUE visitors.
Scenario: your site has 5 pages and 2 different people look at the site.
Person 1 looks at 4 pages.
Person 2 gets bored and just looks at the homepage.

thus, Total Page views = 5.
This can be a measure of how interesting or 'Sticky' your site is.
One visitor may generate ten page views and another may generate five page views
– in which case your two unique visitors generated a total of fifteen page views.

Conclusion

Website Analytics can be a heavy subject and this is just the very tip of the iceberg.

However, you should get a primer on the basics or get someone to manage it for you
- otherwise you'll never, ever get the most 'Bang for your Buck'

Want to know More?
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