Steeped in Statistics?
Web Stats and What They Mean By Kenn Schroder
About the Author . Kenn Schroder is the owner of K3NN Web Development, a team of web experts that help businesses attract more customers using their web site. They offer professional, custom and small business web development and a newsletter offering helpful advice for anyone in business www.k3nn.com
Easy Money
Looking at your web site statistics can help you answer questions like, “How are people finding my site?” and “Why are people not contacting me or buying anything?” and “How can I make my advertising more effective?” Getting answers to these questions can resolve problems that are causing you to miss out on sales.
Web site statistics are easy to get. Just ask your web designer or hosting company for them. But once you got them, the trick is figuring out how to use them to improve your web site. But before we go into that, let's clear up a common misunderstanding.
Let's “hit” on a common misunderstanding
I recently heard someone say they got 17,000 hits last month. They thought that 17,000 people came to their site interested in their products and services. That would be pretty nice if it were true.
A “hit” is request for a resource at your web site. Resources include things like images, html files, flash movies, basically components of a web page. So when a single person visits your home page multiple resources are requested or “hit.” When that person clicks to another page more resources are “hit.” Thus you can see that 1 person can result in hundreds of “hits.”
Now hits can be useful, but often what first time statistic analyzers are interested in is “visitors.” A visitor is a person sitting at a computer visiting your site. No matter how many pages they see or how many times they come back in a day, they are still the same visitor.
So to start digging into your stats, here are five good things to look at right away.
Five valuable things to look at right away
Are your problems bigger than you thought?
If you look at your stats for the first time and see that there is 100 people coming to your site a day but you aren't getting any responses, you have a problem. Knowing you have a problem is the first step towards solving it!Where are people coming from?
You can find out how many people are coming from search engines, directories, and other web sites. You can also see which search engines are sending you the most traffic. For this kind of information you will want to look at statistics related to “referrals.”Are visitors doing what you want them to?
Once you know people are coming to your site, the next thing to check out is if they are doing what you want them to. Are visitors clicking to your coupon page? Are they putting items in their shopping cart? Are they getting to your contact page? To see what they are doing, take a look at “click paths”, “top entrances”, and “top exits.”Is your site broken?
Your site statistics will tell you what errors are happening at your site, such as broken links and missing files. Specifically look for stats related to “error pages” and “status codes.” Also, if you see that a lot of people come to your home page but rarely do they ever click to another page, you might have page load speed problems.When should I make changes to my site?
Close inspection of your statistics can tell you when people come to your site during the week as well as during the year. From this information you can strategically put out special offers when traffic is high as well as schedule maintenance when traffic is low.
The above list is just the tip of the iceberg. There is an endless amount of information you can analyze when it comes to statistics. Some other interesting statistics can tell you about the most popular pages, the most requested files, and the most popular search terms used to find your site.
How to start mining in 3 easy steps
Since getting at your stats is easy and cheap, you should do it. If you have never looked at your web site statistics, here are three easy steps you can take to get your hands dirty.
Call your host or web designer
Ask them for your site statistics. If the information you get doesn't seem useful, you may want to consider purchasing more advanced analytical software like Urchin or Web Trends.Make a simple plan
Reviewing your stats once a month is a great way to get started. Look at the previous month's numbers and see how they change.Change something
Once you see your stats over a period of time, ideas for improving will surface. Make changes to your site and see how numbers change in the coming months.
In conclusion, getting a grip on your stats can be easy, fun and very valuable. The numbers are there, it's just a matter of getting them and looking at them over time. So put on your hard hat, grab your shovel and start digging your site stats for golden nuggets!
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