Website
Statistics
Each website has full page tracking showing
who is accessing your pages, where they are coming from and what
they are looking at.
We have tried to simplify the stats so it
is useful but not confusing, although everyone seems to be
confused about what the stats mean. Before we explain the stats,
you should understand some traffic basic definitions.
Page Views - This is the
number of times a page or pages were viewed. This is not the
number of people visiting your website only the number of pages
that those people have looked at. For example, someone is
shopping and they look at 30 different items, that could be more
than 30 pages views but it was still only one visitor or one
person.
Unique Visitors - Unique
visitors is based on computer ip addresses over a 24 hour period.
This counts the ip addresses and gives you a better outlook on
the number of people visiting your website not to be confused
with the number of pages they actually looked at.
Refering Urls - Each time
a visitor clicks from one page to another you can see where they
came from. If they are already on your website we do not count
that. What we are looking for is if they are coming from search
engines or outside websites. This is important to see where your
business is coming from so you know if ads are working and what
the return is on money you are spending on advertising.
Now lets look at what your management
console will show you.
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To access your web stats look for
the "Web Stats" icon at the top of the
management console. Click on that icon for the main stats
menu. |
You will see an option to view stats by day
or to get a summary for the entire month. We will skip right to
the entire month. The stats are the same, but you wil have more
data in a month than any given day and it will make more sense.
Now we select the month we are looking at
the stats for. Normally the system will store 6 months of data so
you can look at trends and how your traffic is improving or
possibly declining.
We have selected one f our
sample websites marksusedcar.com to take the screen caps from. We
will view the stats for November 2007. We can't show the full
page so we will show the last 2 days, the summary and the top few
referrers.
Looking at the screencap above
you will see on November 29th we had 83 people come to our
website and viewed a total of 559 pages. We have a summar total
for the enire month showing 2201 visitors for the month viewing
8600 pages.
Where are those 2000+ people
comming from? If you look at the refering urls you will see
google search sent us 836 people another 33 clicked on our
sample page and clicked over to see marksusedcar.com, 29
people from AOL's Search and 28 people from used car
classified buzztrader.com. We even
had 32 people from google Canada. There are more down the page,
but we are only showing the top referrers.
Each item will link to the
website so you can click over and see the link back to your
website and why you have the traffic.
Your stats will also show you
which pages were viewed. Each url that was viewed will be listed
with the number of times it was viewed. If you had 500 page views
in one day, it is alot of data to look at and more than we are
going to display on this help page.
That should give you a general
overview of what the data means and how to use it.
If you are paying for ads at
somesite.com, you can see if you are getting traffic from thse
ads. If you are not seeing any results in your stats you know not
to pay for the ads.
Additional Notes:
Referal Spam
- Sometimes spammers will send traffic to your website from their
pages to get listed in your web stats getting you to click over
to their website. Generally this is fake traffic and you should
not consider the referals in your analysis. In most cases, there
is no link on the page shown in your stats and it is just a trick
to get you to their website.
Favicon - You
may see accesses to a favicon which is a file that some browsers
look for in very website. It is not relavent in most websites and
the browser will just ignore it if the file is not available, but
the request will still be logged.
404 File Not Found
- You have no doubt seen 404 errors on the web. A page that was
indexed in the search engines and has since been removed from the
website. You generally get a blank page. However, in our case we
redirect all traffic to the home page. Rather than telling the
potential client the page does not exist, we send them to your
home page so they can enjoy your website. The result will be a
listing in your stats with the page, image or file name despite
the fact that the file has been removed or renamed. This is
critical in preserving your web traffic and allowing you to see
which files or pages you may want to restore.
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