Missed Opportunities #2: What Do You Mean, “Stats”?

“Do you check your web site statistics?”

I ask this question of every web site redesign client I have. And 19 times out of 20, the answer is no. There are lots of reasons, including

1. I don’t think my web site has that.
2. I know I have web stats, but I don’t know how to access them.
3. I’ve tried to look at my stats, but I don’t understand them.
4. I don’t have time to look at them.

If you have a web site, and you don’t look at your stats, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Your stats will tell you:

1. How many unique visitors you have.
   This means: people who visit your web site from a unique computer address. It’s not 100% accurate — public computers, for example your local library computer, will only count as one unique visitor, even though it could be several different users — but it’s a good gauge of how many different people are coming to your site.
2. How many visits you get.
   This means: How many times those unique computer addresses come to your web site. This is a good way to track repeat traffic. Google cares a lot of about #1 and #2 when it comes to assigning you your search engine result rankings.
3. Which pages are being visited.
   A great example of why this should matter to you is happening on a site that I’m working with right now for my local Chamber of Commerce. We thought that the most visited pages of the site were related to our membership activities, but after looking at our stats, I realized that the most visited pages are actually about the towns we serve. What does this mean to us? Two things. One, we need to beef up our Membership pages in order to get more traffic there. Two, we need to add more content to the towns pages. Since people are looking for that information on our site, we need to either provide it, or take those pages down. Having weak pages that don’t include what a visitor is looking for is not the way to make an excellent site.
4. Referring sites
   This means: The sites that have a link to you. Visitors are coming to your site through those links. Google cares A LOT about this.
5. Search words and phrases
   This means: The words and phrases that are being typed into a search engine. You’ve come up as a result, and were clicked on. You should be ranking highly for your company name — that’s kind of a no-brainer. But if you sell t-shirts and your search phrases don’t even include that, or it’s at the bottom of the list, you need to do some web site revamping.
6. Your visits by day
   Why should you care about this? Have you run an ad recently? Done some networking? Gotten some press? Find out if it’s resulting in more web traffic.

Your stats options

Most web hosts offer a web stats program of some kind. I recommend BlueHost — they offer two different stats options: AWStats (which is my favorite — click here for a sample) and Webalizer, along with an exceptional package and great support. I’ve been very happy with them.

Google Analytics is a free program from the masters of all things web related. It’s more complicated to set up — you have to add a script to all of the pages on your site that you want to track. How hard that is depends on how you have your site set up. However, it works in conjunction with the Google Ad Words program if you want it to, which can be very helpful if you’re going that route.

There are other options as well, but these are the ones I recommend most highly.

Check your stats! You’ll be amazed,