So you have made the investment in developing a gorgeous new website—good job!  But is anyone actually visiting your site?  If your web host offers a traffic statistics program, the answer is a click away. 

Here is a quick run through the most important points you will find in your website’s traffic statistics, and what they mean in plain English:

Unique Visitors -- Individuals who visited your site during the past month. If someone visits more than once, they are counted only the first time they visit. This is calculated based on IP numbers, which is only vaguely accurate; it cannot tell if the visitor is logging on using a different computer (such as at work instead of at home).

Number of Visits -- Total number of visits made by all visitors during the past month.

Visits/visitor -- The total number of visitors divided by the number of unique visitors. An indicator of how many times your visitors revisited your website in that month.

Pages -- Hits to files designated as pages (such as .html or .php). Supporting graphics and other non-page files are not counted.

Pages/visit -- A measure of how many pages, on average, are viewed per visit to your site.  This is a good indicator of how "sticky" your website is in keeping visitors browsing.

Hits -- A single action on the web server as it appears in the log file. A visitor downloading a single image file is logged as one hit. While the volume of hits is an indicator of web server traffic, it is not an accurate reflection of how many pages are being looked at.

Bandwidth -- Total number of bytes downloaded. This includes all graphics and downloadable files such as PDFs.

Visits Duration -- The time visitors spent on your site. This almost always is weighted heavier toward the shorter visits (0-30 seconds), as folks browsing online can be mighty impatient. The more visitors who are staying on your site, longer, the better! In web marketer's jargon, this is referred to as "stickiness".

Entry Page -- This indicates the number of visitors who entered your site via this page (usually your " / " or root page will be the most popular).

Exit Page -- The number of visitors who left your site after viewing this page. If you are finding that a certain page is overly high in exits, you might want to take a look at it and figure out why (could it be there is some offensive content on that page?). Generally your root page will also be the highest for this category, due to the impulsiveness of 'Net users.

Direct address/bookmarks -- This indicates the number of visitors who visited your site by either typing the address in directly in the address bar, or by using a previously-set bookmark ("Favorites") to reach your site.

Links from Search Engines, external pages -- Figures in these categories demonstrate the number of visitors who found your site by clicking on a link to it from another website or search engine. These are then broken down into which search engines and websites are providing you the greatest number of visitors, which can come in very handy when promoting your site online.

Search Keyphrases -- This list is a compilation of phrases that visitors used in search engines to find your site. This can be helpful in learning what people are most interested in when they arrive at your site.

Search Keywords -- A break-down of the search phrases, with individual words added up.  This can help a clever website marketer to embed keywords within their site's content to increase its attractiveness (in the search engines' eyes).

You are now armed with some basic insight, which you can build upon in your online marketing campaigns.

Interested in adding website statistics to your site?  Contact us, and we'll hook you up!