I’ve commented more than once on the importance of having a good website statistics program and I’ve talked about the advantages and disadvantages of a few different programs.
I’ve never written about specific statistics and how to use them. So here are a few tips.
One of the most important uses is to monitor increases and decreases in visits to your website over time, and generally where they come from.
This is best viewed on a monthly basis. Daily or even weekly stats don’t mean much. There’s too much variation. Weekly stats are useful for monitoring the effects of intermittent events (you can see the weekly spike from the once a month email broadcast).
If your efforts aren’t increasing total visits to your website, you need to change something. That is the broadest possible measure of the success of your promotional efforts.
Total visits breaks down two ways. The first is “unique visitors” versus “monthly uniques” or “new visitors” or “repeat visitors.” Most good stats programs count “unique visitors” rather than just “visits”. This doesn’t count twice if someone visits your site twice in the same day.
In most cases, the more important breakdown is by how they found your site: “Bookmark or direct” (meaning they got to your website some other way than by clicking on a link on another website), “Organic search”, “Paid search”, “Links/Directories” (meaning they clicked on a link other than a search engine), and “Other” are the main categories we use. You can see where your increases or decreases are coming from and take action.
We’re also interested in page views per visit. The more pages someone views on your site, the more likely the visit will turn into a lead or sale. Amount of time (seconds or minutes) spent on site doesn’t mean much as visitors could have left a window open on your website for hours and never looked at it.
These are the broadest statistics. There is a great deal more detail a good statistic program provides, that can help you improve your website and your marketing.