Tips & Tricks in Understanding Stats and Statistics Packages
OK, so hopefully you've read a bit about the various stats packages, what they have to work with, and all the various flaws in between. So, knowing that, it's essential to know what particular statistics you should be interested in. Hopefully this page will make that a bit clearer.
In effect, most stats packages are making the decision for you regarding which statistics are most important because they tend to put the most important stats on the first page of their reports. If they don't, then they tend to be within the first few pages. Increasingly, stats packages are also separating different reports out based on your requirements, giving you (for example) statistics from the point of view of: webmaster, marketing manager, CEO, etc.
I would regard the following as the essential reports for anyone who has a website:
- No. of visitors
An obvious couple to start with, you want to know how many people have visited your website in any particular period.
- No. of page views
Again, in the same period you need an idea of the number of page views that have been seen in this period. Although most stats programs will work it out for you, by having these top two stats, you can then calculate the numbers of page views per visit (page-views / visitors). Your aim in this respect depends entirely on the nature of your website but clearly you want to make sure that your visitors are not finding your site, visiting a single page, and then leaving. If the calculation above shows that visitors are seeing between 1 and 2 pages per visit (on average over the period) then this may require investigation.
With these two statistics alone, plus the pages/visit calculation, it is less essential to know the average time spent per page, or per visit, which is why I have not included them here as essential statistics.
- No. of search engine referals (natural search-engine traffic via searches) + break down of search terms used
It is always important to ensure that you are
- Aware of the level of traffic your site is receiving from search engines
- That the terms that people are using to find your site are relevant
In combination you will get an overview of which search engines are successfully sending traffic your way, and with which search terms. Based on this you can adjust the keywords on your website. A website will not live and die on search engine traffic but any website which is successful will nonetheless do well to bear in mind that search engine traffic is essentially free, and as such deserves some time allocated to targetting it as a method of receiving traffic.
- No. of direct referals (links from other websites) + breakdown of sites
Some would argue that this is not an essential statistic since there is nothing you can do about which sites link to you. I'd cautiously agree about this, however, it is always worthwhile checking that any sites who are linking to you are not "stealing" your traffic by focusing on the same search terms as you, or indeed posting advertisements (eg. google ads) that infringe on your content or site name.
However, another good reason to check your referal statistics is to ensure that sites are not hot-linking your images, thus increasing your bandwidth bills!
- Bad requests (404 Page not found errors, etc)
Everyone would do well to bring to attention to their webmasters, any bad requests that are occuring on their websites, specifically 404 errors. 404 errors probably mean that a page has been accidentally deleted or moved, or instead that there are bad links in the website referring to pages which are no longer there.
- No. of unique vs. return visitors
Are you retaining the interest of your visitors? Or is your website just a "one-off visit" kind of site? Well, this statistic will let you know if you don't already and is useful for identifying how to address any problem, if there is one, or how to take advantage of your returning user base.
- No. of robot visitors + break down of names
As already suggested throughout the site, robotic visitors can be a bane of the web site owner when trying to calculate visitor and page view numbers (and everything else!). Having a clear idea of the numbers of non-human visitors is important when assessing the success of your website. If you can also get a break-down of the names of the robots then you are also in a good position to know that you website is being crawled by the important search-engine crawler.
|
|
|