Once your website is up and running, your major goal will be to increase the level of traffic to your site each month.
Website Analytics software helps, by monitoring:
a) How much traffic your site is getting
b) How visitors are interacting with your website
Website usage data can be vital in helping you market your products and services. Keeping track of statistics helps you improve your site's functionality, which in turn improves sales.
Taking a quick look at your statistics after running a promotion can also be helpful in determining the effectiveness of your marketing.
Some of the information you can analyse includes:
1. Unique Visitors
2. Days of the Week
3. Hours
4. Visit duration
5. Top 10 Pages
6. Website Referrals
Unique Visitors
The screenshot above shows the monthly traffic figures for a website from January 2005 to the first week of April 2005.
As you can see there are, five columns with the following headings:
Out of the five columns listed, the most important one is the 'unique visitors' column.
'Unique visitors' measures how many people are visiting your website each month and is a good website traffic benchmark. But before we discuss unique visitors, let's speak about 'website hits' for a moment:
H.I.T.S should be an acronym for 'How Idiots Track Success'.
You may have spoken with other website owners or read articles online that make reference to 'hits'. Something along the lines of this:
"You should advertise on our website because we're getting 100,000 hits every month"
To the unknowing beginner 100,000 hits sounds like a big figure, but there's a huge difference between 'hits' and 'unique visitors'.
First of all, what exactly is a 'hit'?
A hit is recorded every time somebody:
In short, a hit is a record of every time someone views anything on your website.
It's important to note that every single image on your website is counted as a separate hit. This means if your home page contains 10 graphics, a single visit from one person would result in 10 hits.
Counting hits is like trying to measure the amount of rain drops in a storm instead of measuring what really matters (inches of rainfall).
The bottom line is that 'hits' by themselves are a misleading way to measure website traffic, simply because one person can generate hundreds of hits. What you're really looking for is not 'hits' but the number of 'unique visitors' your website is receiving.
'Unique visitors' represent how many individuals visited your website within a given time frame. If the one person visits your site seven times in the one day, they are still counted as one 'unique visitor'.
Days of the Week
The screenshot above shows you how much traffic your website is getting each day of the week.
In this example, Monday and Tuesday are the most popular days of the week for this website.
Visit duration
Visit duration gives you a percentage breakdown on how long people are spending on your website. Obviously, the longer a person spends on your website, the more interested they are.
What does this mean?
By examining these reports you can find out:
Final Thoughts on Website Analytics
Website usage data can be vital in helping you market your products and services. Keeping track of statistics helps you improve your site's functionality, which in turn improves sales.
Reviewing your Website Analytics once a month should be often enough to see how you're performing.
Taking a quick look at your statistics after running a promotion can also be helpful in determining the effectiveness of your marketing.
Copyright ©2000-2008 eCommerce Websites. All Rights Reserved. Terms & Conditions | Privacy Policy
eCommerce Websites offers professional and affordable e-commerce website design for small business owners.
