Many of you may not be familiar with some of the terms in the statistics package "LiveStats" offered when your website is built by iSmart Software, so here are a few of the more common terms and their meanings.

Visitors
Visitors, as the name suggests, is the amount of traffic you have to your website. If ten people ‘visit’ your website in one day then you will have ten visitors show up in your stats.

Page Views
Page views are the 'web pages' that are viewed by visitors to your website. If 1 visitor went to 5 pages you would have
Visitors = 1
Page Views = 5

Hits
Hits are described as a request from your server. This means that every time someone downloads a webpage, image or file, this is classified as a ‘hit’. Therefore, you could have ten visitors to your website who each visit three WebPages pages and download five images.
Visitors = 10
Hits = 50

(Note – Some ruthless marketers can dupe unsuspecting clients by talking about hits on their websites. Remember, hits are not indicative of the number of visitors to your site.)

Entry Pages
This is the page that a visitor enters your website. Most of the time this page is your home page however, you will often be surprised at the pages that are marked as entry pages. A person bookmarking a particular page on your site or search engines bringing up results other than your homepage is a common cause for pages other than your homepage to show up as entry pages.

Exit Pages
This is the page where a visitor leaves. If you notice that people are leaving on one particular page, it may be worthwhile looking at that page and seeing if there is some way to improve it or keep people clicking through your site.

These are some of the more common terms in statistics packages, but how can you make your website better by using the information gathered in statistics?

Note – Remember all iSmart Create customers have access to the statistics package "LiveStats". If you need help with this program please feel free to contact me and I would be happy to go through it with you.

Visits.
Look at your visits for the week and month. Map out the times when you get the most visitors on your website and try to have any promotional material available at these times. This way, more people will see your offer.

Pages
Find out what pages are the most popular on your website and why. You may be surprised to find out what people are looking at. (Note – iSmart Poll is a great way to find out what visitors like about your site).

Downloads
Find out what downloads are the most popular and make these the most accessible. If you have many downloadable documents on the one page (downloads page, media release page etc) track which ones are the most popular and put these at the top. It is no use making your customers scroll through reams of information for the most popular documents; these should be easy to locate.

Time spent per visit
This is useful to see if people are actually reading or surfing your website. If the time spent per visit is 10 seconds and most of your visitors are finding you through search engines, you may want to look at your listing and how your site is being described. It may be a case that your site is not relevant to a particular search keyword and people leave as soon as they get there. Likewise, do not get too excited if people are looking at your site for a very long time. Many people leave web-browsers open for long periods in between working on emails, in Word etc. (Particularly during 9am-5pm working hours).

Bad Requests
This feature shows URLs requested by your visitors that resulted in an error. This is a very handy tool to make sure your website is ‘healthy’ and does not contain broken links.

Browser Types
It is always good to find out what browser visitors are using to look at your website. This way you can optimise your website for the most commonly used browsers of your customer base.

Referring Domains
This will tell you if visitors come to your website via a link from an external website. This is handy if you have your website link on multiple external websites, as it shows how much traffic is generated by these sites.

Search Engines
This tells you what search engines are used to find your website. This information is essential if you are relying on traffic from search engines. The information shown in this report will tell you how many visitors each search engine generated and which ones are the most popular. This will help in ongoing search engine marketing strategies as you can work on generating better listing on the search engines that bring in the most visitors.

Search Phrases
This is one of the most important aspect of website statistics. It allows you to see what keyword terms visitors are using to find your website. This is important as you may be referencing ‘apples’ but your visitor is looking for ‘red delicious’. They are still both apples but if ‘red delicious’ is typed into a search engine, visitors will not find your site. To keep your site up to date, it is a good idea to get the keywords from your stats package and add them to your website metadata as often as possible.

(Note – iSmart Create users can add metadata keywords to their website under the search engine tab in iSmart Create).

This gives you a good general understanding of website statistics and how they can be used to improve your website. Remember that today’s consumers expect websites to be ever evolving and easy to use and extract information, so spending some time looking at how they use it is used will prove invaluable.

If you would like further information on how to improve your website using statistics, please feel free to contact me .

you can also read a bit deeper about Understanding Web Statistics