Statistics and Reporting

Analysing and understanding the success of your web presence is an important factor for succesful websites.

A web development project is an ongoing financial undertaking, having a good idea about your return on investment is a prudent move for any business looking for increased visibility on the web. Analysing your project through statistics and reporting techniques will assist you in learning which aspects of your website work well, and which are not performing as you would like them to. Fine tuning your website having the benefit of informative analytics will likely attract more visitors and improve the conversion rate from visitors to clients.

The internet offers a broad array of tracking, performance and statistics tools, and is fairly easy to get a good idea of your websites performance by committing some time to analysis, and without having to spend any money.

Website analytics also assist businesses in tracking traditional marketing campaigns such as a tv or newspaper advert – through the resulting traffic you can see in your website traffic statistics.

The most popular and widespread website analytics package, used by millions of businesses worldwide is Google Analytics, a free, user friendly, and extremely powerful resource.

The extent to which you utilise Google Analytics is up to the time you are prepared to set aside to discover and take advantage of all it has to offer. Tools range from basic reporting on the number of site visitors through to setting up specific goals to track the performance of certain areas of your online marketing.
More information on what Google Analytics can easily be discovered through research on the website – here is a useful place to start:
http://services.google.com/analytics/tour/index_en-US.html.

Google Analytics is not the only analytics program out there, online research will provide you with a host of other alternatives should you wish to try something else.

'Visits' terminology
  • Visits: The number of times your website was viewed within a period of time. Not such a useful indicator this figure counts return visits from the same viewer.
  • Pageviews: A similar measurement as Visits, but instead of counting visits to the site, this counts the number of pages that were viewed.
  • Unique visitors: Arguably the most indicative and significant metric – Unique visitors is the number of unique visits to your site over a period of times. Only the initial visit of an individual is counted.
  • Hits: A commonly used metric that is in fact not very useful at all. Hits are the number of requests that a browser makes to a website server in order to show the page content. Each image on a page would add a hit to the count. This figure can quickly add up into the thousands – which may seem quite impressive to someone who does not understand what a hit really is; but actually not a very informative indicator of your site's performance.
Traffic sources
Traffic arrives at your website from three sources:
  • Search engines:  Visits that originated because a link to your site appeared in the results of a search engine.
  • Direct traffic: Your website address has been directly entered into the address bar of a web browser.
  • Referring sites: Traffic that originated from another site that has a link to your website
Content
Website stats software such as Google Analytics does more than just show you information on who visited your website and where they came from. They also provide a lot of information regarding what the visitors are viewing on your site, in what order and for how long. This information can highlight which pages are receiving very few visitors, and require attention, as well as sowing which pages are performing well – giving you an idea of what you are doing right on your website.
Pages with a high exit rate are ones which visitors decide to leave your website – reviewing these pages and addressing potential issues with them may lead to visitors remaining longer on your site and resulting in more business.

Conversions

A conversion is a certain action that you would like a visitor to take when visiting your website, such as subscribing to a newsletter, sending an email enquiry, making a booking etc.
You can measure conversions in analytics programs such as Google Analytics but setting up and monitoring 'goals'. Once a goal has been achieved, the analytics program records it as a conversion, and after a period of time you will have some useful data giving you an insight into the performance of your website, and if it is achieving the results you hoped it would do.

Analytics programs allow you to measure conversions by letting you set up goals. Once your visitor has achieved that goal, the program will count it as one conversion.

Setting up goals and monitoring conversions is a vital ongoing tracking task if your business is serious about turning visits into enquiries and sales. Learn more from this article about Google Analytics Goals and Funnels, or by viewing this presentation.

Further web analytics resources: