Marketing Help: Analyzing Your Website Statistics

Do you know how many people visit your website in a given week or month? How long they stay? How many pages they’ve visited? These are important numbers to know. Analytical tools such as Webtrends and Google Analytics can let you see how your website performs.

The largest number is usually related to the gross number of page views that your site experiences. But it’s also important to look at the figure that shows the number of “unique” views, the actual number of people who’ve visited your site in a given time period, usually a week or a month. This can give you some real insight into the effectiveness of your website content in keeping people interested. As can the average “time on page” figure. For example, if you had 158 page views in a month, with 74 unique views, that means that about 53% of your website visitors found enough there of interest to them to get them to return. If, on the other hand, your landing page prompts visitors to take action by placing an order or subscribing to something then the relationship between the two numbers may mean something entirely different. It really depends on what your website is designed to do.

You can also look at the exit rate — the percentage of people who left your site after viewing only a particular page — and the bounce rate, which is the percentage of people who left after viewing a second or subsequent pages. If your exit rate for a page is, say, 34%, then about one-third of the people visiting left after viewing that page. Again, this may be just fine if they answered a “call to action” on that first page How are you measuring web site performance? What tools do you find helpful and which measurements give you the best insights into your customers’ needs and interests?

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