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Making Sense of Oakville Website Statistics
Every Oakville website owner wants lots of traffic
directed to their website, but this can sometimes involve
spending a lot of time and money. Fortunately, most website
owners can increase their return on investment simply by
paying closer attention to their website log files. Most
Oakville website hosting companies have special software installed
that will process these website log files and display the
information in an easy to read format. From this information
website owners can get an understanding as to how many
people are visiting the Toronto website, where the visitors are
coming from, where they are entering and exiting the
website, the average number of page views per visit, and
many more interesting facts. These statistics will allow you
to better analyze the effectiveness of promotional campaigns
and give you some insight as to how you can tweak your
Toronto
website to increase your return on investment.
“Hits” Explained
There seems to be some confusion regarding
the terms used to describe website visitor traffic. We
usually hear website owners speak in terms of “hits” to
their website. Hits don’t accurately describe the number of
visitors viewing the website – they are actually just any sort of HTTP
request made to your server. Not only are requests made for
website pages, but also for all the images and other files
associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page
view could actually result in dozens of hits, and if a
single user visits many pages on your website, this visit
could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can
excite some website owners, but this number is not a
reliable indictor of how many people have actually visited
the website.
The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount
of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A
unique impression will measure the number of actual people
visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and
operating system. No matter how many “hits” a visitor
registers on your website, the server will record her
session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique
visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffic
the website is generating.
What to Look for When Analyzing Website Traffic
Number of Unique Visitors: We’ve already determined that the
best measure of true website traffic is the number of unique
visitors. What we want to look for is a trend in the average
number of unique visitors. On a day to day basis, their may
be a good amount of volatility in the number of unique
visitors, but we want to pay attention to the trend of the
average number of visitors per month. Optimally, we’d like
to have the number increase on a monthly basis.
Entry Page Statistics: From these statistics we can learn
which page people are entering your website. Most visitors
will enter from your home page, but you will notice that up
to 50% of your website traffic originates from a page other
than your home page. It’s important that your website have
an easy to use navigation structure to ensure that visitors
can find the information they are looking for, even if they
don’t enter through your website’s main page.
Bounce Rate: The bounce rate can be defined as the
percentage of people who visit your website and immediately
leave. Don’t get worried if your bounce rate is high – most
websites have a bounce rate of about 50% or so. If the
bounce rate is unusually high, you can experiment with your
website to try and retain more visitors. Maybe you need more
enticing graphics, less text, faster loading pages, or a
more engaging design.
Exit Page Statistics: These statistics will show you where
people are leaving your website. When you know which page is
losing the bulk of your website’s visitors you can
experiment with some changes in an attempt to retain more
visitors.
Average Time & Page Views Per Visit: Website visitors are
very goal oriented and task driven. Upon visiting your
website, most visitors will merely scan the page to quickly
determine whether or not it contains the information they
are searching for. By analyzing the average amount of time
spent on your website and the average number of page views
per visit, you can determine how engaging your website’s
content is. The key to retaining visitors and increasing the
number of page views is to have relevant and interesting
information your website. Remember – content is king!
Top Referring URLs: This statistic lets you know where the
bulk of your website’s traffic is coming from. This is
important if you’re pursuing a website marketing campaign or
search engine optimization campaign because you can easily
judge the campaign’s effectiveness by looking to see how
many visitors each marketing method is generating.
Top Search Words & Phrases: This information will let you
know which keywords and phrases visitors are searching for
in Google and the other search engines in order to find your
website. With this information you can gauge the
effectiveness of a search engine optimization campaign, or
get an idea of how your website’s keyword density should be
altered to position for the keywords and phrases that you’re
targeting.
Browsers, Platforms & Screen Sizes: This information gives
us some insight as to the type of software and hardware your
visitors are using. You should ensure that your website
looks the same across all browsers and operating systems. In
addition, you must pay attention to the screen size and
resolution in which your visitors are viewing your website.
The goal is to ensure that no visitor has to resort to the
horizontal scrolling bar to view you website – this is a
major turnoff for most people.
Country of Origin: A good website stats program will also
let you know the geographic region of your website’s
visitors. This is important if your website only has appeal
in a particular region. For instance, if you own a retail
store that caters to Southwestern Ontario and you notice
that 90% of your website traffic is coming from the U.S.,
then it can easily be determined that you need to re-think
your online marketing strategy.
The goal of website traffic analysis is to assess how well
or how poorly your website is working for your visitors.
From these statistics you can figure out what the problem is
and test some possible solutions. The problem often lies
in the website’s visual appearance, layout, navigation
structure, or keyword optimization. When making
modifications to your website in order to remedy these
problems, it’s best to only make minor and gradual
adjustments, and then assess the progress over the next
month or so to truly understand if your changes were for the
better. Also, remember that sites with greater number of
visitors will have more accurate web statistics. Sites with
smaller numbers of visitors are more prone to have their
averages thrown off by a few anomalous visitors.
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