What kind of an impression are you making?
April 5th, 2007 by 
Chris Pangburn
From page impressions to hits to unique visitors, looking at the visitor statistics for your website can present a baffling array of numbers, statistics and graphs. It is quite worthwhile taking the time to make sense of the stats however, as they can be used for a variety of useful purposes. This short article will help you find out just what gems of information your website statistics are harbouring.
Website statistics come in a variety of packages, they can be installed from your web host (notable packages include the open-source Awstats and Webalizer) and other third-party statistics services. Some third-parties charge website owners an arm and a leg for ‘analytics’ services, however personally I cannot find much to fault the free Google Analytics service. Once you’ve signed up for an account you have to set the service up by inserting some code into your web page. If you had your website designed by us then just contact us and we’ll be more than happy to insert the code for you, otherwise this can be done using any website code editor. Once you’ve installed the code then you’re away, Google will start collecting various data about the visitors to your website, the most useful features for businesses include:
- Website referrals - source of traffic from other websites.
- Search traffic - shows how many users entered your site from search engines, and by which keywords.
- Content Optimisation - allows you to see how well different pages of your content are performing, in terms of bounce rates (the percentage rate at which visitors who enter your site by a page navigate straight off the site), average time spent on pages, and unique visitors.
To clear things up, hits are logged when a file or item such as an image is loaded from the server. Consequently many hits can be logged for just one page view. A page impression is as the name states, the amount of times a page is displayed, and unique visitors are the amount of non-returning unique visitors to your website.
Finding the “Money” Sources
You can also track which keywords and referring websites bring in the most money as a percentage of total visitors, and hence have the best conversion rate by installing the conversion tracking code. You get this code again from within Google Analytics, and it needs to be added to the HTML of an ‘action or process page’ - you define an action page, it could be when someone makes an enquiry, orders a product, or whatever it is that starts the order process for your business. Then whenever a visitor completes this action, the code is triggered and Google records it within Analytics. You will then be able to see which keywords present the best conversion rate, and consequently which are worth targetting further via search engine optimisation, and which you should perhaps not pay as much attention to.
I hope this has given you an introduction to the benefits of watching the statistics for your website, a more detailed article will be published in due course over on the Web Pro Article Directory of our site.
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