Webstats: Your Visitors

Knowing your website visitors is one of the most important aspect of monitoring your website statistics.

Before we begin, let’s clear up a couple terms:

Visitor (also called Hits) – this is ‘any’ visit to your website – could be a real person, could be a search engine robot, could be an email harvester, or could just be a quick blurp of your website on the internet. Although these numbers quickly get high, it’s not the numbers we care about. And depending on your statistics program, a hit on your website may count each item on your page that is opened…so opening your home page on your website could result in as many as 2-35 hits being registered with that one single action.

Unique Visitors – are the visitors we care about. It counts each ‘real’ visitor one time a month – so if that same person comes back 6 times in a month, they won’t squew the unique visitor logs. This is the number that essentially tells you how many real visitors you had visit your website.

Website Challenge: Look at your unique visitor listing and answer the following:

• How many unique visitors to your website this month
• How many unique visitors to your website last month?
• Did the number of unique visitors go up or down?
• If it went down, can you use the rest of your statistics to find out why?

Unique visitors will have a big play as we move through more and more website statistic analysis, but for now, the important thing to know if the difference between your site visitors and your unique visitors – so you can concentrate on the unique visitors.

Call Jolyn today at 780-486-5310 for a website statistic analysis to quickly get you understanding your website statistics and what you should do based on the information it reveals.

Jolyn | Wedding Planner Coach

WebStats: How often?

Understanding your website statistics is an important part of understanding how your website is functioning, how your visitors are using your website and how you can improve your website to make it work better for your business.

If your website is hosted, then you probably have some form of statistics available from your host. I use AWStats available through my host. If you can’t access your website statistics through your website host, then you may want to install GOOGLE analytics to give you some stat access to your website.

So once you find your stats, you’ll probably find tons of data, and graphs, and lists and links…if you’ve never analyzed website statistics before, then you’ll probably be a bit overwhelmed. It’s a lot of information to take in.

I’m going to try to walk you through the different statistical elements of your website at least twice a month, so that you can gain a better understanding of your website – but first, I have a new a habit I want you to develop….

I want you to log in to either your website stats or your google analytics – at least once a week! You think you can do that?? I know it doesn’t sound like much, but it’s important for you to start looking at the numbers and at least seeing if they are going up or going down…and as you start to look at them more frequently, it will start to make more sense.

How often do I look at my website statistics? Well, if I haven’t changed much on my website, then I check my stats out once a week. But if I’m actively changing details on my website or reformating, then I’ll usually end up checking every day to see if any trends are developing. Ultimately, there is no right or wrong answer about how often you check your statistics, it really comes down to how you use the information you find there…but we’ll start analyzing that in our next chat on stats!

Jolyn | Wedding Planner Coach