Understanding Your Host's Web Stats

If you don't know what figures are the important ones among the website statistics your host provides, you're going to be fumbling around in the dark. If you don't know that your host even provides these "metrics" (or "analytics," fancy words for "stats"), then you need to understand that they are very important.

Even if you are not running a business, if you don't know how many of your relatives are really visiting your family photo website then you won't know how, when or why to make improvements. Reports come in a few different shapes, sizes and layouts but use the same terms, pretty much. Therefore, the first step toward understanding what is going on is to learn the terminology that is used in these "web stats" reports.

Unique visitors: This term is what you probably figured out it is-one single, individual that viewed your website during the time period being talked about, whether it's a day, week or month. No matter how many times Uncle Joe (or anyone else) accesses your site to try and pump up the stats, it will be counted a single time during that period. You need to spread your action to get this number up.

Number of visits: This is the number that your relatives can bump up for you, which is why it is not as important a statistic in business. This is the total number of times your site's been visited. By comparing it with the "unique visitors" number you can get an idea of how many people are making return visits, whether productive ones or not.

Page: Obviously, this heading will show you the specific page of your site to which the numbers on that line apply. It may be the home (index) page, the about us page, the contact page or any other page on your site.

Hits: This is a very misunderstood term (by beginners, anyway). Each time a page request is made to the server hosting your site, each file on that page is downloaded to your browser and counted as one hit. Your home page is a single HTML page but with five images on it, the number of hits is six. This is why the number of hits that you get is a poor statistic. Want more hits? Stick more images on every page! (We're kidding.)

Bandwidth: This is simply the total volume of data, measured in MB (megabytes), that is transferred from your host's server to your site visitors' computers. If the text and images on you about page add up to 2MB, 50 people viewing the page will account for data transfer of 100MB. Your web hosting plan states the amount of bandwidth, or data transfer, that you are allotted each month. Exceeding this amount means you will be charged for additional bandwidth at a predetermined rate per MB. You should always keep your eyes on this number to avoid these extra charges.

Visit duration: This is a figure that indicates how long people spend at your site. If they stay for just a few moments, you need to review the copywriting and content to make it "stickier" or think of some other way to keep them around-at least until they have completed your "call to action" (made a purchase, signed up for a newsletter, etc.).

Pages viewed (or "page impressions"): This will tell you the number of people visiting each of your site's pages. This is the way you will know if people are moving along as you hope, or leaving right from where they landed.

Referrers (or "referring URLs"): It is very helpful to know the website address from which your visitors came to your site. Knowing the sites or search engines driving traffic to your site is very useful when refining your online marketing strategy.

Key phrases and keywords: If you know the words and phrases that people use to find your type of site, you can insert more (and more varied) phrases using those popular words into your site content.

Now that you have a basic idea of the terminology, you need to concentrate on the website statistics that are most important. The stats you need to focus on the most are:

- Unique visitors

- Pages viewed

- Referring URLs

- Key phrases and keywords

It is critical for businesses, and important for everyone, to know what their site statistics mean. You need to stay abreast of them, possibly on a daily, even an hourly, basis. They are an important consideration in your marketing plan, they can give you immediate feedback on content changes, they let you know what's working and what isn't and they will help you refine your keywords and phrases.

If you didn't know what web statistics were before now, sign on to your hosting control panel and look for them. If you can't locate them, or don't know if your plan includes them (most do), then get in touch with your host and find out. Understanding and working with your website stats is one of the simplest and lowest-cost ways to improve the performance of your website, and that can translate pretty quickly into more revenue for your business-or more page views for those beautiful kid pictures. Either way, you're reaching more people, and that's the whole raison d'etre of the Internet, oui? In any language, that's a "heck yeah!"