If you don’t know, you are missing a vital step in determining whether web site is successful or if you are just wasting your money.
Every web master or web site owner should be checking their web stats (also know as analytics) every day, . That is how you know what is working for your web site and what is not. Now, when I say you should be checking your web stats, I am not talking about using those worthless “hit counters” that we occasionally see at the bottom of the page (usually saying something like “You are visitor 13,534”). If you use those, you are really just wasting space on your web site and if your web designer put one of those counters on your site, you probably did not check out their credentials very thoroughly before hiring them.
The next time you see a “hit counter” on a site (or, gulp, if you have one on your site right now), take note of the number it displays. Then hit your web browser’s “refresh” button and check out the hit counter again. Do you notice that the number increased by one? If so, that means is that ONE visitor could be responsible for MULTIPLE visits. Try it again and you will more than likely see that number go up with each refresh. It is really not an accurate way to track numbers and that is why a professional web design company will not use them.
Ok, maybe I am being a little harsh, but the point is there is more to tracking stats than viewing a number. In order to gain an accurate and complete picture of your web site traffic, you really should be checking your stats through your web server. There are plenty of third party programs designed to do just that. Once you install one of these programs on your web server or signup for the service, you will be getting much more accurate information including:
- who visits your site
- what pages each of those visitors view
- how long they stay on a given page of your site
- where they are geographically located
- even how the arrived at your site in the first place
That is information that will give a good indication of the “health” of your web site. It helps you see what pages are doing well and what pages need a little TLC.
In future posts, we will examine some of the web analytics programs out there and give you some ideas on how you can put them to use on your site.
A professional web design company will typically offer to track these stats for their clients. In most cases, they will provide regular reports showing the traffic patterns and offer suggestions on how to improve things if needed.
If you would like us to examine your site and give you a comprehensive web site traffic analysis, please contact us and we will setup a consultation to review everything and suggest some ways you could make some improvements.
