Looking at Statistics Part 1: Hits and Visitors
One of the great things about web marketing is the ability to measure and track what people are doing. This means you don’t have to guess at what’s working and not working.
I thought I would start the new year with a back-to-basics look at website statistics. These statistics are available from analytics applications – such as Google Analytics – as well as from your website itself.
Back in the early days of the World Wide Web, people were obsessed with how many ‘hits’ their website was getting. I’m not going to go into the technical side of what a ‘hit’ was measuring and why it was not an accurate count of how many visitors the site had. Suffice it to say that “hits” doesn’t tell you anything valuable from a marketing perspective.
It is much more accurate and useful to look at website “visitors” for both search engine optimization and website performance.
Most statistical software can now do some form of filtering to separate the number of computer spiders which ‘ping’ websites from the number of humans coming to the site, and the software usually calls humans “Visitors”. The first thing to look at within the data is how the visitor numbers are broken down into “Total Visitors”, “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”.
“Total Visitors” is a much more accurate measurement than hits. A word of caution though. For website owners who are used to looking at “hits”, the number of “visitors” can be frightening or depressing because it is a much smaller number. It also suffers from greater fluctuation in the daily numbers. Weekends and holidays can cause massive drops in the number of visitors to many websites but they will return Monday through Friday. I often have to calm business clients when they look at site statistics on weekends.
Beyond “Total Visitors” the numbers breakdown into two groups usually called “New Visitors” and “Returning Visitors”. People often jump on how many new visitors a site gets, but the returning visitor statistic is important too.
“New Visitors” are not necessarily people visiting your site for the first time. Depending on the setup of the data collection from the website some people could be counted as ‘new’ if they only return once every few weeks. They can also be counted as new if they delete the cookies your website or Google has placed on their computer. Still, the number of “new visitors” can provide you with valuable information, especially if the company has started a new marketing campaign or made any changes to the website designed to increase the search engine placement.
While it is important to attract new visitors to your website, the returning visitors should also be appreciated. A high number of “Returning Visitors” means that people like your site and are coming back on a regular basis. “Returning visitors” show customer loyalties and indicate there is something on the website worth coming back for again and again.
I also like returning visitors because I think that if people keep coming back to the website the odds are good that they are telling their co-workers and friends about the website. For some companies and websites a “refer to a friend” button can be a very powerful feature, allowing people an easy way to tell others about your site.
Next week I will continue looking at statistics by looking at “bounce rate”.