Website Stats – Understanding Your Website’s Visitors

Do you want to understand where your website’s visitors are coming from? How they’re finding your site? Whether your on-line advertising or Google Adwords program is working? Then the first step is to understand your website stats.

Standard features:

There are hundreds of website stats packages out there, all offering different ways of viewing your stats, but the following are basic stats that should be universal to all stats packages:

Visitors – The number of people who visit your site. This may be displayed as the number of people for per day, week, month, quarter, or year. It’s important to periodically review the number of visitors to your site as they are a good indication of how much your site is being used.
Pageviews – The number of pages of your site that have been viewed. Pageviews is another good indication of how much your site is being used. If visitors to your site are viewing many pages of your site, then the number of pageviews for a given day will be much higher than the number of visitors. (e.g. if the number of visitors is 20 and the number of pageviews is 200, then on average each visitor is looking at 10 pages in your site).
Hits – The number of separate files which have been served up, including HTML pages, images, and all other files. This is not a very good measure of the amount that your site is being used and has really been made irrelevant now that we can track the number of visitors and pageviews.
Referrers – The sites through which visitors have found your site. These are other websites that have links to your site. When a visitor clicks on that link on the referring site, the stats program counts that as a referral to your site. It will tell you not only the names of all referring sites, but also the number of visitors that each has referred (e.g. a stats package may display “google.com – 50”, meaning that Google has referred 50 visitors to your site during that period).
Search Phrases – These are the phrases that visitors have entered into search engines in order to find your site. For example, if a person types “website designer” into Google, your site comes up, and they click on your link, the stats program will record this. This is very valuable information as you can find out what words and phrases your visitors are using to finding you.

Advanced features:

In addition to the standard features, some stats packages have other features which can be helpful in certain circumstances.

Campaign tracking
Which Web Browsers people are using

Where do I get a stats package:

The following are a list of stats packages that we recommend. Their solutions are affordable and very good value for the solution that they provide:

Ecommstats

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