Web site statistics can provide very important information to a webmaster or website owner. There is a large amount of information that you can get from packages that give website statistics, and these are included in a large amount of web hosting packages, alternatively Google Web Analytics provides detailed analysis of web site performance for free.
Information on the performance of your website that you can get includes the following:
- Number of visitors: You can see the number of visitors to your site over a period of time, this can usually be viewed by the day, week, month or even year, in fact over any period of time. This will provide an insight into the popularity of your website and you can measure trends to see how this is improving.
- Unique visitors: This is a similar measure to the number of visitors, but goes a step further and only includes those that are unique, therefore if one person has visited your site numerous times they are stripped out to show the distinct users of your website. This is generally a more useful measure as the number of total visitors can be misleading and suggest greater popularity than actually exists.
- Ave pages visited: This shows the average number of pages each person who reaches your site views and can suggest how compelling your site is, the greater the pages viewed, the greater the depth in content it suggests/
- Bounce rate: This is the percentage of visitors who only view one page and then leave your website, this could suggest that the page they land on is not adequate for their needs, is not overly useful or is slow to load due to excessive images. You can get stats per page of your web site or for your site as a whole and can prompt some corrective actions or general improvements to your site.
- Length of time of visit: The time each user spends on your website is a useful measure, if people are on your site on average for a large amount of time then your site is likely to be doing well, conversely if it is a short amount of time then it could suggest a problem
- Source of visitor: You can see where each visitor to your website has come from, they could have found your site through a search engine such as Google or Yahoo, alternatively they could come from another website which links to yours. This is useful to show how people are finding your website.
- Keyword searched: This is the search terms that have been entered into the search engine that have resulted with a hit on your website, therefore will give an indication of which words have high popularity among search engines.
- Most popular pages: The number of views per different page can be seen to show which pages are most popular, it is also useful to see the opposite and find those which are least popular or have no views whatsoever over a given period
These statistics are key to understanding he performance of your web site as well as providing a tool to highlight areas for improvement and should help you to achieve an optimum website.