Website Visitor Statistics

After you have had your web presence built, it is essential that you monitor its performance by viewing its visitor statistics. Your visitor statistics are available with all hosting pacakges offered with DesignWeb and will tell you, ultimately, how successful your online or offline marketing campaigns have been.

We have 2 packages that we use for monitoring and reporting the websites log files (visitor statitics) - these are Webalyser and AWStats. Both are powerful and featureful tools that generate advanced web server statistics, graphically. You can access your websites visitor statistics at anytime via your Client Control Panel.

The important areas of your visitor statistics that many client should concern themselves with are detailed below:-

Unique Visitors

Everytime somebody visits your website they are recorded, either as a unique visitor or site, or as a returning visitor. Unique visitors (whether individuals or sites), record visits by their IP address. If an IP address is shared by several people within a company, then those people will all be recorded once. A returning visitor means a visit from the same IP address has returned to the website within a given time frame. Knowing how many people visit your website is very important, as well as what your visitors are actually doing on your website.

Hits

When your web browser requests a web page, or file within the pages itself (image, video clip etc.) a 'hit' is generated. The page could just have a couple of files on it, for example an image and a java script file, or it could have tens or hundreds of files, such as style sheets, lots of image files etc. Therefore, if you are looking at the number of hits as visitors to your website, and about 50 files make up your webpage, then your idea of how many people arrive at your website is vastly inflated. It is best to ignore this statistic. ‘

Referring Sites

This shows you where your visitors are actually coming from. They will show you if a visitor has arrived from a search engine, or from another website that carries a link to your site. You may often see some of your own web pages as referring sites too, which pages of your site have referred visitors to other pages. These stats are very helpful in knowing which search engines are sending the most traffic, and which external links are working the best for your website.

Keywords and Search Phrases

You can find out which keywords visitors used in a search engine query to find your website through the keywords list. This again is very useful as you can see which keywords work, and even find some keywords that people are using to find your site, which you hadn’t thought of.

Other Information

You can also view other information:

  • page views, i.e. which pages people are viewing
  • entry pages and exit pages. 
  • how long visits last, visitor paths, e.g which pages are the most popular
  • countries and towns visitors are from
  • operating system visitors are using, eg Windows XP, which
  • browser, e.g Internet Explorer or Firefox and finally how often the search engines visit
  • User Agent.

If you require a url to view your websites visitor statistics or would like to discuss what the Webalyser statistics mean please do not hesitate to Contact Us.