Managing Website Statistics

All clients of Day Dream Websites get a FREE basic statistics report every month. A more detailed report can be provided to you for $25 per month. Below are just some of the sorts of detail you can get from the advanced statistics report.

Day Dream Websites can tell you a lot about your visitors/ potential customers. We can help you learn about what they like and dislike about your site, where the visitors are coming from, how valuable different sources of traffic are and much more. Day Dream Websites believes that the number 1 goal of learning about your customers is to increase sales.

This is just some of the statistical information that Day Dream Websites can provide to you:

Traffic Sources- where are your visitors coming from?
This is one of the most important reports that website statistics can produce. This information tells you where your visitors are coming from. This is useful if you are paying a high amount of money to a website for them to advertise your site. If a low number of people are clicking on your ad to come to your site, then you should rethink if it’s worth the money you are paying.

You can not only work out the volume of traffic that your advertising is giving you, but also the value of the traffic. Some sources of traffic are more valuable than others. For example the traffic from source (a) may be feeding you lots of visitors who are only interested in browsing and have no intention of ever buying something or contacting you. Traffic source (b) on the other hand may be feeding you visitors who are more likely to make a sale or to contact you.

With the website statistics that Day Dream Websites provides to you, you are able to order your traffic sources according to how valuable they are. For example, Google non paid clicks could be most valuable because (on average) it is getting the most people to the contact us page. A non related website that you advertise on may be the least valuable source of visitors because (on average) it is getting the least people to the contact us page.

You may be getting more traffic from some other site that you are not currently paying to be on. If this is the case then you should contact this site and find out if you can advertise on their site to get even more visitors.

Finding out where you visitors are coming from is also very important if you are using google adwords. Adwords and analytics work well together and you can work out which keywords are getting the best results for you. A couple of ways of measuring success for keywords is the number of pages that the users viewed after coming to your site and if they went to particular pages such as contact us, checkout, or join newsletter.

Unique Visitors
When analytics reports on unique visitors it is supposed to mean the number of individuals. So if your site has 100 visits for a month by the same person, then your unique visits is 1 and your total number of visits is 100.
However, it is difficult to get an accurate figure on unique visitors for a number of reasons
1. Google tracks individuals by the IP address of the computer that the visitor is using. If a number of people use the same computer then they are all using the same IP address so it is not possible to distinguish the different users.
2. A computer may be set up so that the IP address changes every time the computer reboots. In this case it appears as though a number of different computers are visiting the site but in face it is only 1
3. A user may visit a website from a few different computers eg home, university, work etc in which case google will interpret this as a new visitor for each computer, but actually it is the same person using different computers.
4. People on dial up may change their IP address every time they login.
5. A whole companies network that could contain hundreds of computer may use a single IP address as the computers are all connected to a single point.
It is important to keep these points in mind when looking at your stats.
To avoid your own website activity corrupting the stats, you can tell google to ignore any traffic from your computer. You do this by filtering out your IP address.

Top content
Google anaytics can tell you a number useful things about your visitors. You can see which pages or products are drawing the most attention. It is a good idea to give people what they want- so you can increase the amount of popular pages and improve or delete the unpopular pages.
You can also see the average time people spend on your site. This is useful to see if your pages are being read or just skipped over. For example you may have a very long page but the majority of visitors are only spending between 0 and 10 seconds on that page. This means that people are not reading it and that you may want to reformat the text to make it more readable and user friendly. Or perhaps you need more images to make the page more interesting.

Hours and Days
Another interesting piece of information is what days your site is being visited the most. Some websites have a clear pattern from week to week eg the site is very busy on Monday and the traffic drops until the next Monday. This could be useful to work out when you should have you site updated by. For example if your site’s traffic peaks at 1pm on Wednesdays then you should make sure that you site has been updated every week by about 11am every Wednesday.
Looking at the hours and days that you site’s traffic is most active or not active, helps you to think about what factors go into influencing people’s reasons for visiting your site. Once you think about this you are starting to learn about your visitors and this knowledge is key to a successful website.

browser and operating system combinations
Other things that are useful about google analytics is the ability to work out what browsers and operating systems that your visitors are using. The browser is the program that you use to look at webpages. The most popular web browser is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Other browsers include FireFox, and netscape. An operating system is the software installed on your computer that all your other software relies on. The most popular operating system currently is Microsoft windows XP. Other operating systems include mac os 10, 9 etc; Linux; windows Vista, windows 2000, windows 98, and windows 95. If more than 5% of your visitors are using a particular browser and operating system combination, then it is worth ensuring that your site looks and operates properly on that browser and operating system.

Conversion Goals
You can tell google analytics which pages are the most important for your visitors to visit. This is called a goal. The goal of adverting your website may be to get enquiries or sales leads for your business. In this case your goal is to get people to your contact us page. Or perhaps the goal of your website is to get people to buy some products in which case your goal page would be the checkout success page. Once you tell analytics what the URL or the website address of these pages are, analytics can start tracking the visits to these pages and then you don’t need to search through your contents results to find these pages.

User access
You can also give other people access to your account. This is useful if you are getting a specialist to examine your site. You can give them access and then once their work is complete you can remove their access.

Filtering
We touched on filtering earlier when we were talking about filtering our your own IP address. Another way that you can filter the information from analytics is to look at particular sections of your website. For example you may have a section within your website on website tutorials and a different section on increasing visitors. These two sections of information are separated into 2 different directories ie
http://www.daydreamwebsites.com.au/increasing_visitors/
and
http://www.daydreamwebsites.com.au/website_tutorials/

Using filters you can look at the stats for only pages within /increasing_visitors/ or only pages within /website_tutorials/

There are a lot more advanced things that you can do with filters but that is not covered here at this time.

Site Overlay
This is a useful feature that shows you a page on your site and then overlays click number over the top of the page. This way you can see which part of a given page are attracting the most clicks. For example the top right hand corner may consistently attract the most number of clicks. In this case this is would be the best place to put your most important link –for example a link to your shop or a special. Or perhaps it is not the location of the link, but the wording that was used within the link. In this case you can learn what writing style your visitors are reacting the most to.