Who has been visiting your website? What search engine did they come from? What country do they live in? How long did they stay on your website?
Just about every website owner wants to know the answers to these questions and more. With a better understanding of how people come and go on your website, you can implement changes to improve the user experience.
When it comes to website statistics software there can be many reports, graphs, pie charts and other data to look over. At times, it can seem a little overwhelming to someone who is new to reading this type of data.
Have no fear! We are about to reveal some of the best areas where you will want to spend your valuable time.
The main areas you will want to focus on will be:
- Unique Visits
- New vs. Returning Visitors
- Referring Sites
- Search Engine Referrals
- Keywords / Phrases
- Entrance Pages
- Exit Pages
Unique Visits:
As the name suggests, this report will show you how many UNIQUE visitors came to your website. Why would you want to know this? This is one of the best reports to see exactly how many visitors are coming to your website. Each visitor will be counted once, no matter how many times they visit your website that day.
New vs. Returning Visitors:
You will want to compare how many new visitors are coming to your website vs. the people that may come there often. While it is great to have many returning visitors (this is the goal of every website), you will need to know how many new ones you are getting.
Referring Sites:
Are other websites linking to you? Are you paying for advertising space on different websites and want to know how that money translates to actual visitors? The referring sites report will show you this type of data and is an excellent tool for seeing where people are coming from when they get to your website. Are there websites linking to you and generating lots of unexpected traffic? Maybe you should contact them and see if you can get better visibility to maximize visitors. With the help of this report, you will see how to get the most bang for your advertising buck.
Search Engine Referrals:
This report will show how many people came to your website after searching. Lots and lots of search engine referrals are the holy grail of all website owners. Through this data, you will be able to see if there is one or more search engines that are generating more traffic than the rest. This will help you when deciding which search engine may be the best to spend your advertizing dollars.
Keywords / Phrases:
Not only is it important to see which search engines are sending your traffic, it is also very important to know what the visitor searched for (when they found you). Through keyword and phrase analysis, you can see how good certain keywords and phrases are doing for you. Armed with this data, you can not only further optimize your website to capitalize on the best phrases, but also possibly discover phrases that you didn’t think of in the first place.
Entrance Pages:
Entrance pages are the “starting point” where visitors entered your website. This can be very helpful for a number of reasons. Let’s say you sent out an email or mailer talking about a new product or service where people are directed to go to a certain webpage on your website. With this report you could evaluate how well your email or mailer motivated people to go to that page. This report can also help you to see possible “landing pages” where people enter your website unexpectedly due to search engines listings.
Exit Pages:
Alright, we have visitors.. now we need to keep them on the website right? For whatever reason people are going to leave your website it is good to know which pages they exit from the most. Studying the pages where people are bailing out can help you to make a better website that keeps visitors interested for longer periods of time.
Final Thoughts:
We hope that this will help shed some light on a few of the most important areas to focus on when viewing website statistics.
Many hosting companies provide website statistics for hosting accounts, some will charge extra, some will not. At PowerPixServices.com, we provide all new hosting accounts with free website statistics software.
We also provide a much improved stats package called Traffic Facts, that can be added to your account at any time.
When you are ready to kick it up a level, we also provide our Traffic Blazer service that will really put your website into the fast lane!