Many websites include hit counters that let you find out how many people have visited your website over time. What many people do not realize, though is that a little big of deeper digging will allow you to determine what pages are actually being visited, where visitors are leaving, how long visitors are remaining on the website, and a whole lot more. This information is exceptional for allowing you to learn how your website is working, and how effective it is at attracting visitors to your website.
Web Analytics is the study of the visitors to your website, but more specifically it refers to how these visitors behave on your website. Using web analytics, which involves looking closely at the statistics for your website can allow you to work out just how well your website is performing, as well as how any advertising for your website is performing.
A great introduction to the concept of web analytics involves the standard hit counter. An exceptional place to find a free hit counter is at http://myvisitoractivity.com/. Once you have a stat counter hit counter installed on your website, you can log in to the service to check the stats for your website. There are graphs and charts that show you how your website is performing. The first graph of stats has a green bar that shows page loads, which is how many times your website is shown on a screen. If you divide the number of visitors by the number of page loads, you can determine roughly how many pages a single viewer looks at on average. Return visitors is important, and return visitors are actually more important to your website’s performance than even unique visitors are. Many people, for exactly, will view a website as many as eight times before they ever consider making a purchase.
One of the most important calculations that you can use as a part of your web analytics process is the pages viewed per visit. If half of your visitors are leaving before they visit more than two pages, then you know that your website is having difficulty capturing interest from its visitors. Problems like this can be explained by the website design or the web site’s wording, or perhaps its inability to compete with rival businesses in the industry.
Another important metric as part of your web analytics is what page the visitor last saw before they left the website, or the ‘exit page’. Why are your visitors leaving on this website? What can you do to change this?
The last web analytic metric worth considering is the length of the visit. How sticky is your website? Are you good at capturing and keeping the viewer’s attention, or do they leave quickly after visiting? Use this statistic to determine how effective your website is, and improve it if you want to watch your visitor rate increase.
Your web counter is a powerful tool if you know how to use it.
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April 22nd, 2008 at 5:31 pm
Wow! I would say this is a must to have on a site especially for beginners like me. I wish I found out about this long time ago. I’ve been search for that type of tool. Currently I only rely on RSS feeds but I don’t really get much about my site readers.
May 5th, 2008 at 1:27 am
I’m using a hit counter too and I think its useful if you want to know what pages that your visitor like and figure out their behaviour on the site. If we notice some pages thats not so popular, then we can arrange something to increase the traffic. And what I like about hit counter is we can match the colour with our website style.
June 11th, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I knew about Hit Counters but I didn’t know there was much to it than just counting page views. I like the part about knowing the length of each visit. It lets you know how long your site stays open on someone else’s browser.