Measurable results & No-nonsense website visitor statistics

Web stats are very important. They tell you what results you are getting from the money you spend promoting your website. Measuring ill-defined "hits" can be imprecise. Real page views by real people is what really matters.

The knowledge you need

How many people went your website?

Which pages are people interested in?

It's a good idea to regularly purge your site of pages that people don't look at - they may just be cluttering the place up. Let your visitors decide what they want to look at and concentrate on developing the most popular content.

Is your advertising bringing the right sort of people to your site?

An important measurement is the number of pages viewed by each visitor, because it indicates whether people find your content relevant to their needs. If you spend money on advertising you will expect to get people to your website, but if the stats show that they only look at one page you are probably wasting your money. Generally, if the average number of pages that your visitors look is high it shows that the advertising is bringing in the right sort of people. Keep an eye on this figure over time and see how it matches your marketing activities.

What do people type into a search engine to find your website?

A list of the phrases people typed into search engines to find your site.

A regular review of these keywords and phrases allows you to mould your website textual content so that search engines will give you a higher ranking for the terms your potential customers actually type in, rather than the ones you think they might use. In this way you can benefit enormously from the free traffic that can be generated from the major search engines.

How did people get to your site?

Did they type in the web address or did they come from another site? If you are getting links from another website it's nice to know so that you can thank them. If you are paying for advertising (we recommend the use of Google Adwords), you need to know exactly how many visitors you are getting for your money.

It is worth regularly monitoring referrers (that's the website your visitor linked from) to see how much free traffic you are getting to your website from search engines.

Want to know about spiders, crawlers and robots?

And other, automated visitors - No, we thought not.