This page will help you to understand your website statistics.
Please follow the steps below to access the statistics for your site;
From the Console screen click “Administration” button and select “Site Statistics” or select “Administration” –> “Site Statistics“ from top menu.
- New window like below will open up with your site statistics details.
STATISTIC: First you are given a summary of:
- Unique Visitors – Raw number of people coming to your website. This is much more important that Hits, which are simply the number of HTTP requests received. A single page is likely to involve multiple “hits” to get images and content for example.
- Number of Visits – Repeat visitors, this will indicate how engaging your site is. This one is highly dependent on great content on your website.
- Pages – Pages per visit.
- Hits: which can be further broken down into: (Hits are the number of requests a visitors browser will make to get all of the content on your page, this includes images and text)
a) hours of the day
b) days of the week
c) days of the month
d) months of the year.
MEANING: The statistics package can track the IP (Internet Protocol) address of a visitor’s computer; therefore can distinguish whether the user has visited your site on a previous occasion. It’s important to compare Unique Visitors and Number of Visits to establish how many ‘new’ visitors are visiting your site in comparison to how many visits your site has had in total.
You can track the average number of pages and hits viewed by these visitors (i.e. – 4.5 pages per visit). The term ‘hits’ refers to the number of times someone downloads
information from your site, i.e. clicks on a picture, downloads a document etc. Once again this is given as an average, (i.e. 13.51 hits per visit).
FACT: Did you know that 80-90% of ALL website traffic originates from a search engine such as Google, Yahoo and MSN. See how you can optimise your website for search engines.
STATISTIC: Visitor Domains and Countries.
MEANING: This allows you to see which country your visitors are from. The stats package will give you a complete list of all the user countries that have visited your site and break them down into how many pages they have viewed as well as the number of hits made. This is important to determine which pages may or may not be relevant to certain users.
STATISTIC: Hosts
MEANING: This shows the different Internet Service Providers (ISP) browsing your site. E.g. ‘Optusnet’, ‘Bigpond’ or ‘IPrimus’. Once again a breakdown of the number of pages viewed and total hits are available.
STATISTIC: Robots/Spiders Visitors
MEANING: ‘Robots’ and ‘Spiders’ are the key functions for search engine optimisation (SEO) so it is important to know that they have recognised your site and are tracking it. The stats package displays how many times in a month the various robots and spiders have visited your site e.g. Googlebot (Google) and WISENutbot (Looksmart). It also shows you when they last visited your site.
TIP: Robots and spiders visit your site more frequently if your site is updated regularly. Therefore to maximise these search engine visits, we advise you to keep your site active and make changes and updates as often as you can. These robots and spiders also operate by following links on the Internet, therefore, the more links pointing to your website, the better chance you have of search engines indexing your site.
STATISTIC: Visits duration
MEANING: It is important to know how long people are spending browsing your site to know if your site is ‘interesting’ enough to sustain their visit. Obviously the longer they are on your site the greater the interest your site is providing. The report is broken down into:
a) 0-30secs
b) 30secs-2min
c) 2-5mins
d) 5-15mins
e) 15-30mins
f) 30mins-1hr
g) 1hr+.
Within these breakdowns, the package shows you the amount of time your visitors have spent on your site. It is then broken down into a percentage and an average. E.g. 52% of visitors spend 0-30secs on your site. This could mean for example, that there is too much Flash within your site and it is taking too long to download – so people get bored and click away.
STATISTIC: Pages
MEANING: It is obviously important to know which pages your visitors are viewing, and similarly, which pages they aren’t. The stats package breaks down each page and displays how many times it has been viewed. This shows you which pages are most popular and those which are least popular, enabling you to better promote pages that are not being looked at that may be important to your site.
STATISTIC: Operating Systems
MEANING: This statistic shows you how many hits have been generated from the various operating systems i.e. Windows, Macintosh, Linux etc. The vast majority will most likely be from a Windows operating system.
STATISTIC: Browsers
MEANING: This statistic shows you how many hits have been generated from the various browsers i.e. MS Internet Explorer, Netscape, Mozilla etc. Once again, the vast majority will most likely be from Microsoft Internet Explorer.
STATISTIC: Connect to site from……
MEANING: This particular statistic is very important. It shows you how each visitor has found your site and is broken down into various sections:
a) Direct address/bookmark – this means that the visitor has typed in your web address straight off or already has you saved as a bookmark on their browser (i.e.: favourites).
b) Links from an Internet Search Engine – this means that your visitor has found you from a particular search engine and lists which accordingly, i.e. Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc.
c) Links from an external page – this means that another separate website has a link to your site and this is how the visitor has found you. This is obviously handy for companies who offer ‘kick backs’ when interest is generated from an external link. It also breaks each link down so that you can see how many pages/hits (and %) have come from each site with your link on it.
d) Links from an internal page – shows you how pages have been viewed from an internal link on your own site.
NB: Each breakdown shows the number of pages and hits and then a percentage for each.
STATISTIC: Search Key phrases/Keywords
MEANING: This is very important with regard to SEO. This particular statistic highlights a full list of the key phrases your visitors are typing into search engines searches. It shows how many times that particular phrase has been typed in and gives every different variation i.e. business coach – 6 times (15.7%), business training in Australia – 4 times (10.5%) business coaching – 3 times (7.8%) etc. This is duplicated for singular keywords also e.g. business – 25 times (22.5%) training – 11 times (9.9%) etc.
STATISTIC: HTTP Error codes
MEANING: This stat will show you when a visitor has had an HTTP error code. Possible errors include the ‘404’ error, that is, ‘Page cannot be found.’ This usually means someone has followed a hyperlink to a page that no longer exists. I.e., you have deleted an obsolete page but have not removed internal hyperlinks leading to that page.
If you would like to add Google Analytics to your website, please see this article.