How to Use Your Website Statistics
If you host your website with us already, we can provide you with access to your website statistics, which give you an insight into the number of people visiting your site- as well as a lot more information! If you don't already have the details on how to view yours then you can contact us and we'll be happy to assist.
The following is an overview of the standard AWStats package which we provide. You may have slightly differing stats but most of the information will still apply.
The Summary
When you first log in to the stats, you will see quite a lot of information displayed. The first thing to note is the summary. This shows the information for the current month.
Viewed Traffic:
This represents the people who have actually been viewing your web site.
Unique Visitors:
A unique visitor is a visitor that has visited at least 1 page of your site during the current period shown by the report. If this visitor makes several visits during this period, it is counted only once. So if the same person viewed your site every day for a month it would only count as one on this figure.
Number of Visits:
This is the total number of visits made by all visitors. If a visitor views more than one page then you should expect to see multiple pages per visit and if the same person comes back more than an hour later then you will get multiple visits from the same visitor.
Pages:
The number of “pages” the visitor has viewed. This doesn’t include all the files that are looked at as part of that page (such as the images).
Hits:
Any files requested from the server – this will include any images etc that are loaded as part of the pages.
Bandwidth:
Total number of bytes (data) for pages, images and files downloaded by people browsing your site.
Monthly History
This shows the traffic trends over the months of the current year to date and can give you a good broad picture of general trends (for example changes in the number of visitors over this period of time).
Days of month / Days of week
Below the monthly history is a breakdown of the individual days of the current month. This shows visitor statistics over the current month, and below that, over the current week, giving you a good idea of what's been happening stats-wise in recent days. Underneath each graph the information is further broken down into information about the day of the week and the hours of the day.
Countries
This shows which countries your visitors have come from, and can be useful if you're targeting particular countries at any point.
Hosts
The hosts section simply shows the “hostname” of the people who have visited your site most during the current month.
Other sections further down that may be of interest include:
Visits Duration
This shows you how long visitors stay on your site for. Remember that a large percentage of people reaching any web page are going to be “casual” browsers and so they may well have a very quick look around and then leave- however you should also see that a number of people stay for longer to look through the content on your site.
Pages-URL
This section can be of interest as it shows which pages on your site have been the most popular during the month- this can in turn give a good insight into the behaviour and habits of people who come to and return to the site.
Connect to Site From
This section indicates the proportion of visitors who have come from “Direct address” (these have either typed your website in directly or come to you from a bookmark (they have previously made your site one of their “Favourites”), or from a Search Engine (these are listed in order of popularity) or from an external link. Often a visit from an external link will be because of a link exchange that we may have set up for your site. It may also be a link that someone has placed on their site because they like yours and feel that it's relevant to their own content.
Search Keyphrases
Finally, the Search Keyphrases list gives you an insight into what phrases people are typing into search engines such as Google, from which they are then finding your site.
And finally, a word or two about: Google Analytics
In addition to the stats that come as part of your web hosting you may also find Google Analytics to be of benefit when tracking the effectiveness of your website.
It is free to set up a Google account, and once you have registered Google can provide you with a tracking code that needs to be installed on the index page of your website. If you would like to add Google Analytics to your website we can add the code to your site for you. Just get in touch with the snippet of code that Google gave you when you set up Analytics on your Google account. If you would like help setting up a Google account or need advice about anything related to it, don't hesitate to get in touch!
