A counter that only shows the number of site visitors is useless. You should have a website statistical package that helps provide information to help you strengthen your site.
A good traffic statistics package will show:
- The number of visitors to your website.
- How they found your website (directly by typing your domain name into the browser, through which search engine or link from another website).
- What keyword search phrases they used to find your website.
- What are the most visited pages of your website.
- What page they entered your site.
- What page they left your site.
- How long they were visiting your website.
- How many users returned to visit your website again.
At first glance, web traffic statistics can be confusing because of the
sheer volume of data. So lets look at the key areas.
Page views
Page views per visitor shows how many visitors came to your site and their duration of stay. An acceptable minimal figure can be 2 page views per visitor.
Unique visitors
A unique visitor is a user that has made at least 1 visit on 1 page of your website during the current period shown by the report. If this user make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.
Visits
Number of visits made by all visitors. Think "session" here, say a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the "pages" are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests).
Days of the week / month
Reviewing what day users visit your website
may show patterns of
usage. It will prove useful during some advertising campaigns such as through
radio or television. It also tells you which day to have new content on your website ready for new or repeat visitors.
Bandwidth
Bandwidth
represents the total amount of data sent out from your server. All
images and text take up space on the server. Websites with streaming video or large music files utilize
significantly more bandwidth than all-text sites
.
If bandwidth increases, it generally means that business is up.
However, if bandwidth costs are increasing faster than profits, you may
want to consider downsizing file sizes.
Entry Page / Exit Page
Tracks where visitors come into your site, and where they leave. You
may want to put special offers or new visitor information on your top
entry pages. Alternatively, you may want to modify your exit pages to
be more compelling or to make a final appeal. You can also see if
visitors are coming to view specific information (an article or offer)
and not going anywhere else.
Session Duration
The time a visitor spent on your site for each visit. You will be surprised how quickly users can achieve their goal on a well designed website. For a small static information only website up to 2 minutes is about average. For a shop 2-5 minutes will easily cover a purchase.
Keywords and key phrases
The words users are searching to find your site on search engines. Watch carefully which key phrases are bringing
people to the site.
Google Analytics video
As you can tell from the accent we didnt make this video but it provides a simple explanation as to how to read your Google Analytics data.
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