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MAKING SENSE OF WEBSITE STATISTICS

(originally published as a Bulletin to our Artisan Website Clients)

Dear Artisan Website Client,

Excuse me for going on again about server statistics, but I keep getting questions, and I want to be sure that you understand what I believe is significant and what is not.

But first, it may be useful to remind you that on the first or second of every month the server automatically sends you an email link to your statistics. If you are not getting that email, call me and I'll track down the problem and make sure that you get your server statistics in a timely and reliable fashion.

The only stats I bother to look at are Visits and Pages. I ignore the rest of the categories (Hits, Files, Bandwidth, etc.) because they have little relevance to my admittedly narrow concerns: how many people came to your website and what did they do.

The Visits stat measures how many times people arrived at your website. It measures Visits, not visitors, meaning that if a person Visits twice, that person is logged twice, no matter what the time interval.

The Pages stat measures how many unique web pages were viewed, which is mostly significant as part of a ratio with Visits. For example, if the ratio of Pages to Visits goes from 2:1 to 4:1, then I would conclude that your average visitor is seeing twice as many pages. I would further conclude that said average visitor is thereby getting more engaged, more educated and more sold.

More generally, I find that server statistics are useful mainly as a barometer for how your website is doing and when it is necessary to look deeper. As I have noted elsewhere, supplementing this information with search engine rankings of your most critical keyword phrases furnishes a more complete picture about not just how your website is doing, but what specifically you can do to improve it.

Finally, it is likely that we have legacy server statistics archived for you and that we have sent them to you sometime in the past. If we didn't send them or you can't find them, contact me and I will make sure that you get a copy of what we have.

Best Wishes,

John M. Corbett, President
Corbett Research Group, Inc.
Florence, MA 01062