How to Understand Website Traffic Statistics
Whether your website is meant for online sales, for simply promoting your brand or it is an information source, you want to know how popular it is and how well it is doing. That is why verifying website traffic statistics is important, as they help you monitor how many people are accessing your website, what pages in particular attract the most interest or how visitors have “landed” on your site.
There are several free tools that can be found online and which provide you with a website traffic analysis. They usually require that you install a script so that a website traffic report is generated. It is best to choose one or two such services to use, as picking up more of them will probably lead to slowing down the site.
Website traffic statistics – common terms that should be understood
In order to understand traffic stats, you must understand what they show; therefore, you must understand their specific language.
1. Number of visitors – This number shows the number of visits your website has received during the time frame of your choice (day, week or month). Your aim should be not at hundreds of visitors, but at thousands. See how many visits you have received and then look at the number of unique visitors and you will understand if people like your website: are people coming back after one visit?
2. Unique visitor – Basically, a visitor is a unique visitor when he or she visits your site for the very first time. However, you must verify how your particular website traffic statistics service counts. There are statistics packages that reset their count every 30 minutes and that will surely affect who is perceived as a first-time visitor – the same three people can generate ten unique visits during a day, for example, if they come back several times at intervals longer than 30 minutes. Your service probably allows you to set parameters as you wish.
Also, if visitors have cookies disabled, then it cannot be said if they are unique visitors or not. Let’s say the reset is performed once in a week: if you have many visitors but few unique visitors, it means people keep coming back, but few new ones are attracted to your site. Depending on your business, you might be more interested in keeping visitors “faithful” or more interested in constantly having new ones. You might want to think what traffic generation strategies to adopt, if you do want more new visitors and even get targeted traffic.
3. Number of pages viewed – If people land on your website and visit more than one page, then it means that they are truly interested in what you have to offer. The more pages they browse through, the more chances there are that these visitors become your customers if you are offering a product or a service. If you have a blog, after you figure out how to get traffic to your blog, you probably want to keep people interested in as much as possible of what you have to offer on that blog.
4. Length of time on site – If visitors leave your site quickly, then you may not have attracted the right people for what you have to offer or you are not giving what people are lead to expect. You must figure out if people from other circles must be attracted to your site or if you need to work a little bit more on your offer.
5. Entry pages – All pages on your site can be the doorway to the whole of the website. Top entry pages can show pages that are especially promoted, therefore they are the first people land on, or that those pages are returned in natural searches (with search engines) given certain user queries that match keywords or tags on your page. See why they are entry pages and you will understand what people want from you.
6. Exit pages – If a certain page appears to be the exit page for several visitors, see why it is so: is there something wrong that needs to be changed or is it actually okay? If the exit page is a reservation form, for example, then there is probably nothing to worry about.
7. Pages most viewed – This shows what pages are of the most interest for people. This can guide you to what creating new pages is concerned. You might want to provide more information on a topic or focus or on developing and distributing a certain type of product. Maybe new pages are not necessary, but simply adding to a page, or maybe you might even get inspired to build a new site on a popular topic.
We have only covered some of the basic terms related to website traffic statistics, but “basic” means that they are some of the most useful ones in guiding you in what changes you might need to operate to your website to attract more visitors and, in the end, leads.
