Web statistics - search for the truth in your website’s statistics
Web statistics are the cause of a lot of confusion in business. There are questions that arise like:
- What web statistics package should you use?
- What are the important statistics to look for?
- How can you verify that they are accurate?
If you’re relying on the web statistics package that your web host provided for you, then chances are your web statistics are wildly inaccurate.
Typically web hosts (particularly the budget variety) provide statistics package such as:
- AWStats
- Webalyser
- Livestats.
Using the web statistics package that your web host provided most likely means that you don’t have much to go on in your search for truth! The data in these Web statistics packages is usually clouded with dubious stats generated by spiders and web bots scanning your site. What you’ll find is that your numbers probably aren’t that great.
The first question you need to ask in evaluating a web statistics package is, “What do I need to get out of it?”
The key statistic to derive from your web stats is the number of visits.
From there, you can also look for:
- How do they get there?
- Where are they located?
- What search terms did they use to find you?
- How long did they stay?
- How many pages did they look at?
Getting these answers will help you to paint an accurate picture about your website. From this, you can make educated decisions about how you can change your website to increase its conversion rates.
So which web statistics package do we choose?
We’ve chosen Google Analytics for us and our customers based on these key benefits:
- It covers all of the basics in a user friendly way
- The stats are accurate and up to date
- Being an outsourced solution, it’s kept up to date
- It tracks pay per click campaigns
- It can track conversion rates.
There are many more benefits too but, most of all, it’s free to Google Adwords customers.
About the author: As the owner of a web marketing business, I’ve spent the last 7 years studying ways to boost the conversion rates of my clients’ websites. Today, our best websites convert up to 20% of visits into leads and 50% of leads to sales. The target for our clients is a minimum 5% conversion rate on visits to leads which is staggeringly more than the typical website at 0.1%.
Bitemark specialises in designing, building, writing, managing and marketing websites with high conversion rates.
