e-skills UK Guide
Web statistics
Understanding statistics
Any small business that has invested in a web site would be interested in the number of people visiting their site. A site that receives lots of visitors has to be doing something right, even if there are still some improvements you would like to make. Conversely if your site is not attracting many visitors then you need to ask yourself why and explore the issues.
Like any business investment a website needs to be seen to perform. By regularly monitoring your website you will be able to make more money by tuning your site to generate more custom. Tools to assist you in this monitoring can be very inexpensive or free, although top of the range tools can be expensive.
What are web statistics?
Every time you browse the web you may visit a number of websites. Some of these maybe your favourites, others you may come across using a search engine. Each time you visit an individual website a record is kept by that site that it has received a visitor. This data is normally accumulated in a computer log file which in turn can be examined to see how many people have visited that particular web site each day.
Lies, damn lies and web statistics
You may hear of web sites boasting of the thousands of visitors they receive each hour. That maybe the case, but in understanding how to measure the success of your small business site you need to understand some of the pitfalls and misleading statements that are around.
Many sites will quote the number of hits they receive each day or week. Hits are recorded in the computer log file we mentioned earlier. The problem is that a web page will often comprise lots of images and other files all of which count as a hit when a visitor visits a web page. One user can be responsible for tens of hits! Relying on hits alone will mislead you about the success of your site. Whilst a set of hit based data accrued over time may be useful for trend spotting, in isolation it will give you a false sense of success. In small business we need to be honest with ourselves.
You may also hear of other metrics such as the number of sessions, unique visitors, repeat visitors, new visitors and impressions. Most small businesses should not need to bother about the different type of web statistics and instead focus on the page view which is a more realistic measure as it will reflect the pages seen by users.
Gathering web statistics
There are a number of tools, ad-ins and products that can help collect and present visitor data from your web site. The majority of these will expect you to have access to the computer running the website or to the individual files that make up your web site. They may require you to paste some programming code into a specific file.
Companies offering add in web statistics tools include:
WebTrends
Other vendors, in particular those that “host” (i.e. run) your site may offer statistics gathering as part of their package. The following hosting companies offer web statistics packages:
Easyspace
What Now
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