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Friday, August 24, 2007
Previously I discussed the importance of measuring the performance of your website in order to understand the ROI you were receiving. Nowadays there are plenty of very comprehensive web statistic packages out there that will give you every single detail of how your website is performing. These details can be quite confusing and if you don't understand what it is you're looking at then you are missing out. Listed below are the key items I look for when analysing a website and why they are important.
Visitors
Naturally, this item measures the number of visitors (sometimes unique) to your website. Obviously this is a very important statistic to measure because it is effectively an indication of the traffic reaching your site.
Page views
When a visitor goes to your site and visits three individual pages, you will receive one visit and three page views. This is an important factor to measure particularly when you have rebuilt your website because it can give you a good idea of how usable the site is and how well traffic is flowing throughout the site.
Hits
The hits on a website is basically the number of files delivered to the users computer. A file can be both a web page and an image. So if a visitor lands on a web page with 9 images on, you will receive 10 hits to your total count. Although 'hits' seem to be the in word when it comes to measuring traffic to your website but it shouldn't be relied on as an accurate measurement.
Those are the most obvious items that can be measured, but here are the other items that I pay most attention to:
Bounce rate
A Bounce occurs when a website visitor leaves a page or a site without visiting any other pages. The Bounce Rate for a single page is the number of people who visit a page and leave within the specified timeout period, divided by the total number of people who have visited the page. In contrast, the Bounce Rate for a website is the number of web site visitors who visit only a single page of a website per session divided by the total number of website visitors.
Bounce rates can be used to help determine the effectiveness or performance of an entry page. An entry page with a low bounce rate means that the page effectively causes visitors to view more pages and continue on deeper into the website. Naturally you want to lower the bounce rate on a page which means you are improving its effectiveness.
Referring keywords
This is my most commonly used statistic. This tells you exactly what keyword users are typing into the search engine in order to find your website. You can expect to find your company name as the most popular as these people are simply looking for your contact details. However, it is really great information to find out what keywords are working and which ones aren't. You can use this information to to ensure that you are getting the right sort of traffic to your site and tweak the keywords accordingly.
Referring URL
Just like the above point, it was good to know where your other traffic is coming from.
Time spent per page
As it says, this is the average time each user is spends on each page. This can either be a good or a bad thing depending on how complicated your site is. Either way, it will give you a good idea of how much a user is looking at on each page and will tell you if there's too much or too little on there.
Exit pages
Obviously this tells you which page most people are leaving at. This is not a bad thing because you can't expect people to stay on your site forever! Keep a close eye on this, you can expect the contact page to be the highest here but if any others start to get lost of exits, it is worth investigating why.
I hope this goes to show just a small amount of information that you can find out through web stats and the power you have over what is happening and how you can improve your site very easily.