Website Stats and Analytics – Do you know what it means?

Do any of these sound familiar?

“According to my website stats I get 3000 hits per month but I’m not getting any sales”

“My SEO provider tells me my visits are increasing by 150% each month but I haven’t had any enquiries yet”

“I am paying £1000 per month advertising in forums and online magazines. I have had some sales but I don’t know if they were down to the banner ads.”

“I spend £3000 per month on PPC. They have a great click through rate but I don’t know if there are any sales”

“My SEO got me ranking for that term I wanted but I’m still not getting any sales.”

Website stats are a funny thing. They can tell you so much but they can also tell you so little. The scary thing is that the data from those stats can easily be presented in such a way that it looks impressive.

Often it’s the terminology that can be misleading. I wonder how many business owners actually know what Hits and Visits are.

Hits

An increase in hits does not necessarily mean your website is doing better.

Many website stats display ‘hits’ and often people think this means actual human visits. It doesn’t. Hits means the number of times an element in a page is downloaded. So if another website displays an image using your image url, everytime that external page is loaded your stats will report a hit. Your own webpages can report multiple hits for every SINGLE visit. Hits should only be used to monitor for potential problems (other websites using your images, etc).

Visits

An increase in visits does not necessarily mean your website is doing better either.

Visits are generally actual visits to your webpage. But visits are not always potential customers. A large portion of these could be:

• Robots
• Researchers
• Competitors
• You
• Your service providers
• Sales people looking for clients

If you don’t really understand the stats package you are using it is very easy to look at them and ‘see’ an improvement. Equally, it is also easy for a service provider to translate the data to demonstrate an improvement when there may be none.

Who are your Visitors?

Log files, stats packages and analytics profiles can tell you so much more than I’m going to talk about here. You can set up custom reports, you can track a visitor journey, you can use them to monitor specific campaigns. Advanced reporting can be extremely helpful particularly for the large and lucrative websites, but for most of the small businesses out there you should at the very least be keeping an eye on these key areas:

Sources: Your stats should at least show you visits from organic search, paid search, direct hits, referring sites. And if your goals are set up you will be able to see how many visits from each of these sources actually converted into a sale or action.

• Were those ‘golden ranks’ that you thought would make you a millionaire worth the effort?
• What is the return on investment for those forum banners, online magazine ads, sponsorship deals?
• Are your facebook page or twitter account updates generating visits, sales or actions?
• Are you spending more than you are making on your PPC campaign?

Visitor type (unique or returning): A customer could visit 100 times without making a sale. Your service provider could visit your site 100 times or more in a month. You can visit your own site several times a day (You can only filter out visits from static IP addresses, many these days are dynamic)

Goals (transactions and contact requests): It’s no good to report just on who lands on your contact page or basket page. Goals are only met when an action has taken place. There needs to be an actual landing page for a contact request sent or a sale completed.

Ecommerce Tracking: If you have set up a goal for sales you can see if a sale has been made which means you are half way there to measuring your ROI (return on investment). But let’s say a banner advert costing £50 per month brings in 5 sales per month and when you look at the ecommerce data you find that the total of those sales is also no more than £50. Your actual profit is even less when you take away overheads and materials costs.

Visitor Location: Your stats can show you where your visitors are coming from. If you only sell to the UK and your stats show that the majority of visits are from Spain is that really an improvement?

When you are paying for a service such as online marketing and especially when that service is SEO (something that you can’t see or touch) it can be difficult to justify the expense unless you can see some kind of improvement. And your service provider may feel that to keep you optimistic they need to demonstrate an increase, somewhere, in the early stages and that’s great if it is a genuine improvement that meets the aims but not if the service provider knows the visits are not ‘genuine’. Not only does it give a false impression to the client but it also clouds what needs to be built upon for the service provider. Everyone needs to be able to see what is happening on a website, good or bad. The good (if genuine improvement) should be sung from the rooftops. But the bad should also be included, otherwise how do you know what is working and what needs to be changed?

See my Website Traffic Monitoring Package if you would like professional assistance.