How to interpret your stats

As standard we add a graphical statistical analysis package to all new websites. This allows you to view details about who has been viewing your website.

Unfortunately, unless you know something about how the internet works, you may not be able to work out what all of the numbers you see mean. Everyone who has listened to an internet sales pitch will hear that they are guaranteed more 'hits', but most people (including those doing the selling) don't know what a hit is.

Hits are an all but pointless statistic to consider. Looking at this webpage, you will have actually scored over a dozen hits on our website, even if you did nothing else here. A hit is EVERYTHING that a visitor gets from a website, each time you visit a page your browser doesn't just see the page, but all of the files which make up the page. This includes images, style sheets and flash movies. If you run an online shop with us, then you will find hits even less helpful due to the complexities of the shop software.

This can be useful to technically trained experts, who want to see how the site performs in a technical sense, as well as in a marketing sense, but for the layman it is simply baffling and of virtually no use at all.

So, how do you find the nuggets of gold that are helpful in the stats?

Put simply, there are three numbers in the statistics that you should to pay attention to:

1. Unique Visitors
   The number of different people who have looked at the website (or, more accurately, it is the number of different IP addresses used to access the website but it is close enough that it is useful).
2. Number of visits
   The number of distinctly seperate visits made to the website by those visitors. By comparing this with the number of unique visitors you can determine how many of those visitors come back.
3. Number of pages
   This is the number times a page has been viewed in total.

There is other information which is useful within the stats;

1. Pages -
   This shows how many times each page within the site has been viewed. The stats software can determine where people are entering and leaving the site. This can be helpful in showing which pages are being found in the search engines and which pages are 'turning people away'.
2. Connect to site from

   • Direct access: The number of pages viewed by people typing in the address directly, or following a link from outside the browser (such as in an email or bookmark). This would typically include every visit made to the site by both yourselves and us.
   • Search Engines: The number of pages viewed on the site by people linking through from a search engine (this does not include Bing, which this version of the software doesn't recognise as a search engine [1]).
   • External pages: The number of pages viewed on the site by people linking through from any other website.
3. Search keyphrases
   This is arguably the most important for us, this shows what people are typing into search engines to find the website. You can experiment with these keyphrases by typing them into search engines yourselves to see where in the results the site appears [2].

[1] Newer versions of the software do recognise Bing as a search engine, however if we were to install these new versions there is a good chance you would lose all existing data.

[2] Do bear in mind that Google and Bing both retain a search history if you integrate your browser with them (by using Google Chrome for Google or Internet Explorer for Bing, or using their respective toolbars). This means that you will see erroneous results as they both show you sites you have found before. The way to avoid this is to use a second browser (you can download these for free) and use this specifically for checking search engine results. We would recommend Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome or Opera.