Here a few tips on how to read web stats reporting tools like Google Analytics, Urchin and Webalizer.

Definitions

Visits or Sessions
Urchin uses the term "Sessions", most other systems use the term "Visits". Both terms mean the same thing. Every time a visitor visits your website, it is counted as one visit or session. If one visitor returns to your site three times in one day, it is counted as three visits.

Visitors or "Unique Visitors"
A visitor is an individual person. If one visitor returns to your site three times in one day, it is counted as one visitor.

Pages
Every time a page is viewed by one of your visitors, it is counted as a page.

Pages/Visit
This figure shows you how many pages each visitor views on average.

Bounce Rate
This is the percentage of visits where the visitor looked at one page, and left straight away.

Tips

• If you can set a Date Range (Google Analytics, Urchin), look at the month to (yesterday's) date. So if today is the 16th of September, set the date range for the 31 days from 16th of August to 15th of September. Why yesterday? Because today's stats have not been processsed yet, yesterday is the last full day of stats information.
• If it is difficult to set a Date Range, look at the last full month of Stats. So if today is the 16th of September, look at August's stats report.

Important Web Statistics for Small Business Websites

• Visits: Your visits should improve over time. You will see spikes or increases in visitors after an event, such as a promotion or email newsletter. Spikes in traffic could also be caused by an external event, like another busy site linking to your site, or Google improving your ranking, etc.
• Pages/Visit: Aim for a ratio of 3 or higher. This means that every visitor is viewing at least 3 pages on average (per visit). In general, the higher the ratio, the more satisfied a user is with the site - they are having a good look around, as opposed to backing out or going somewhere else.
• Hourly usage: Some stats reports (like Urchin and Webalizer) are able to show you what time(s) of the day your site is most busy. When you start to get a lot of visits each month, this will smooth out to a trend curve and you will see when most of your visitors are visiting your site. This is a good opportunity to tune your content to profile your visitors. What sort of mood will they be in? What will be happening around them? Are you promoting or detracting from that mood?
• Referrers / Referrals / Referring Sites: This is a list of all of the sites that link to your site and send (refer) visitors to your site. It is interesting and encouraging to see who else is linking to your site. It is also great for Search Engine Rankings.
• Search Strings / Search Terms / Keywords - These are the search terms that people enter when they are looking for you on Google (and other search engines). You can get some "wrong numbers", but these are great to see what the most popular (successful) keywords for your site. In Google Analytics, have a look at the Bounce Rate alongside each keyword. A high Bounce Rate indicates that the visitor arrived at your site and did not think that your website could help them in any way (they left straight away). How could you improve the content on your site to lower this Bounce Rate?

Other Notes

You can't get any personal information from these stats, like who they are or where they are. You can get a rough idea of what country and region they are from by their I.P addresses, but it is not a reliable indicator. Webaliser and Urchin will sometimes graph visitor country data using the IP Address method. Google Analytics has a great Map Overlay graph that is also based on IP address information.

Finally, don't forget the old saying, "there are lies, damn lies and statistics", so don't take everything you see in these reports as gospel. Use other forms of research, sales reports and customer feedback to back these numbers up. Use this information to build up a profile of your typical visitor...

Are you giving them what they want?

- Adapted from an article from daniel.larsen.net.nz

All Klixo Web Hosting packages come with Urchin Webstats version 5. We can also install tracking codes for Google Analytics into your website templates, and setup your Google Analytics account.Contact us for details.