How Web Stats Effect Your Business

Email this to a friend   Print this story

Your website stats can tell you a lot about who is coming to your website. Checking your web stats once a month can tell you who is coming from where, how long they are staying, what pages they visit the most and more. If you depend on online traffic, learning to read and interpret your website stats are vital to your online company survival. Outlined are the most important stats and how to read them. Referring Search Engines This feature tells you what search engines are spidering your site and how many pages they spidered. You should include a file in your website to help direct where you want the search engines to go. This is called a Robots.txt file. Using the robots.txt file will also help block search engines from places you don't want them to visit. Referring Sites You can check how well your advertising campaigns are bringing in results. This will also tell you what websites have linked to you. You can also tell who is hotlinking images or applications from this area. Key Phrases Key phrase stats tell you what search terms a user has searched in a search engine to get to your site. This can also help you tweak your meta tags for future pages. Search engines show results by relevance. Relevance is accomplished by meta tags, your site title, your site content, and sometimes PR. Also, make sure you follow the seach engine rules so you don't get banned. Http Error Codes The most common http error codes are: 404 = document not found 401 = unauthorized 400 = bad request If a lot of users are being redirected to error pages, you can make a page that will display each time a user comes across that error. For instance, if you want to display a page whenever a user requests a page that is no longer there, you can make something called a "404 Error Page". Countries If you are targeting specific countries, this will be useful to tell you what part of the world your visitors are coming from. Unique Visitors Unique visitors are sometimes confused with "hits" (see below). Unique visitors are actual unique IP addresses that the stats keep track of. Each different IP is considered a different person. Hits Hits are like file requests. There can be 1 or more hits o­n o­ne page. For instance, this page alone has many hits whenever o­ne unique person views this page. The reason is that image files o­n a page count as a hit as well. When you add them up, o­ne page can equal multiple hits. Visits Duration This tells you how long each visitor is staying at your website. You will probably want your visitors to stay around 5-15 minutes to make an impression. If the majority of your visitors are o­nly staying a few seconds you might want to go over your pages and try to figure out if the problem is technical or you might want to check the reason you think your visitors aren't staying. Questions? If you have questions about web stats, feel free to email me. Tia Scott has been a professional graphic designer and web consultant for almost 5 years. She currently owns and operates Client Centers, LLC based in Tampa, Florida