Website Statistics and Web Analytics

Online marketing is one of the most rewarding aspects of marketing because it is so open to monitoring campaigns. Of the many companies we have worked with, one of the main comments upon arrival has been "we have web statistics available, but we rarely look at them, don't know how to analyse them - and when we do we don't know what it all means".

It is clear that companies are getting close to where they should be, but sometimes they need a little assistance understanding how to use website analytics.

Some of the benefits of web analytics:

You can see where your visitors are arriving from
You can identify if you are attracting the right audience
You can identify popular pages
You can highlight any common problems (e.g. pages not loading, exit points)
You can identify if most of your visitors are new or returning
You can monitor the success of landing pages

Lies, dammed lies and statistics

As with any form of statistical analysis, web stats can also be misleading if not used correctly. For example many advertising sites quote how many impressions they get, how many visitors they attract and so on. However this kind of reporting may be misleading. For example, just because a page was visited it does not follow that the information or adverts were actually seen.

Common Web analytics terminology:

Impressions - An advertisement's appearance on an accessed Web page
Visitor - a person who visits a Web site more than once within a specified period of time
Page view - a web page that has been viewed by one visitor
Hit - the retrieval of any item, like a page or a graphic, from a Web server

Monitoring and analysing website statistics can be a time consuming, but rewarding task. It can help you identify how successful your communications strategy has been, how successful and advertising campaign has been and also simply how popular your website is. If you would like a little more help understanding statistics and how they can help you, please contact us