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[18/12/2009] Where can I get statistics for my website?
You have set up a website to represent your company to offer services and products to customers all over the world. You update the website, providing fresh and relevant information every now and then. The only thing missing, however, is a measure of all the vital statistics that are required to know what you are doing right and where you are going wrong. To explain it further, you might need to know the impact of some efforts that you undertook to make your business grow. Not to worry. The internet offers solutions to every requirement.
The simplest requirement is to know all about your visitor. What pages they looked around, what components did they click on, so on and so forth. With software available such as AWStats or Webalyser, one can easily analyze all this data available in server log-files. Moreover, this software is offered by website hosts who install them on their servers and make them available to their clients. There is another way to analyze the data. Crazy Egg and Google Analytics offer services and allow the clients to sign up to avail of the same. What this software does is to send their clients a piece of code which is to be copied and then pasted onto the pages of your website. These codes send information to a server whenever a visitor visits your website. It is also possible to use both these services to get a clear picture and understanding as to who visits your website and why.
In order to make sense of all the jargon that perhaps your web design company in London who created and manages your website uses to describe the statistics, let us familiarize ourselves with the same. This way, we can decide for ourselves what is needed to correct the wrongs and augment the sales.
We must understand that a “hit” to your website is not necessarily the number of visitors. The web page might have numerous images and html files on it. The hit is an addition of all the images and files. In order to accurately measure the number of visitors, it is better to take into account the “page views” since it only records the html files on a page. However counting the number of visitors who were unique to your website gives the most accurate and clear picture. In order to track the regular visitors, one can take a look at the number of times they visited the website. You can also find out which are the most popular and sought after pages on your website. This may or may not necessarily be the ones that you would have wanted the customer to focus their attention on. You can also get an understanding as to what drew the visitors to your website. Perhaps they found a link from another website, thereby telling you how successful your promotion strategies have been or they could have found you from a search on a search engine, which in turn tells you how high you are ranked in the list of searches.
Now that you have understood some terms, you must use them in statistics. Finding out how many visitors actually bought your products or services will give you an idea as to whether you need to launch any discounts or offers to entice them. Perhaps your web pages aren’t attractive enough to hold the attention of the visitor. You can find this out by measuring the number of pages that each visitor takes a look at. Is the number of visitors increasing over a period of time? Check this out by measuring the month on month growth in visitors.
Statistics is very important to tell us where we should concentrate our efforts in order to make our business successful.
