Netco newsletter December/January 2007

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity

 

Stats and lies

How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity

Web Sites hosted through Netco all share a clever piece of software that ticks away in the background, recording all activity associated with the site.

The software is a Web site statistics package and in our case, it‘s AW Stats and its value lies in the figures it gathers, not in its prettiness, of which it has none. AW Stats runs constantly on the server on which your site is hosted and interprets all the records of visits that the server gathers. It records when the visitors arrive, which pages they looked at, how long they looked at them, what sort of operating system they were using, which browser they used and even where they were in your site when they clicked their way off to somewhere else.

Site statistics tell a tale about your site and you should be checking them frequently, seeing which combination of pages and links attracts most visitors, holds them for longest and results in sales or views. This is a complex discipline and here, we are describing just the bare bones.

Hits

Hits count the number of ‘things‘ you send out to a visitor when he or she sees your web page. ‘Things‘ include a count for each image and even the the page itself. In other words, if you have the page, five mug shots and your banner image, someone viewing your pages counts as 7 ‘hits‘. Distrust any organisation that advertises fantastic numbers of ‘hits‘ on its web site. It‘s an interesting, if extremely inflated, figure of site popularity.

Page views

Page views record the complete pages viewed by your visitors. This is a good month-by-month figure to track to see whether interest in your site is waxing or waning. It‘s more accurate when viewed within your organisation and more honest, when publicised, than straight hits.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth measures the bits and bytes that flow from your web site to fill the screen of a visitor.

For you to see the videos on YouTube or the scenery on Google Earth, bits and bytes are sent to your computer down your Internet connection. The same happens when someone clicks to view your site except it‘s you sending out the bits and bytes. Your site host buys bandwidth and sells it on to you. If your site publicises something amazing, expect more visitors and hence, that you‘ll expend more bandwidth.

It can be a Catch 22: you want to be popular but you don‘t want to be exposed to too much cost in bandwidth. Even without becoming popular, watch for increased bandwidth. Perhaps you are offering large PDF files for download (make sure they‘re text and not images of pages such as a modern photocopier produces).

Maybe you‘re putting images up on the site at 300 dots per inch (they should be at 72 dpi) or offering Word documents with images embedded in them for download (reduce the image resolution and put the document into a PDF). All these things (and many others) contribute to large bandwidth use because they occupy more bytes of disk space and consequently increase traffic when your web site serves them to visitors.

URLs

A URL is just the address of one of your pages. Monthly statistics include your most popular pages. If you‘re putting a lot of effort into one section of your site and find that almost no one visits it you might rethink your plans for your site and concentrate on more popular pages. The stats report offers the top ten pages and a link to a report on all pages in your site.

Connections

Look at the detail page on connections to see which sites link directly to yours. Search engines give more prominence to sites that have many links into them. This is also a handy tool to see what other sites are saying about you.

Searches

Search terms are what visitors were looking for when they were presented with your site by a search engine. Are you offering them the information? Is it relevant to your site? It‘s good intelligence on what visitors want.

this issue:
Protect yourself with simple password tricks | Make e-mail earn its keep | How To make sense of your Web site‘s activity