Why It’s Important to Know What Your Website Stats Really Mean

If you have blog or website you probably have some sort of means of tracking the amount of web traffic you get to that site.  That is called analytics or in layman terms, stats.  There are usually two types of people when it comes to stats – those who understand it and those who don’t.

If you don’t understand what your blog stats are telling you, you can’t accurately measure the success of your website.  You can’t determine conversion rates, weather a certain marketing plan is working or not, or if your visitors even like your site.

By understand your website stats you can find out:

  1. How many page views your site gets. This is the number of pages a person visits on your website.  Page views are a good overall estimate of your total web traffic because it shows how much of your content is actually being viewed. For example, if you have 1,000 pageviews over the course of 30 days that means that 1,000 pages on your site was viewed by somebody.  A note to make is that pageviews are not user specific.  In this example, the same person could have viewed all 1,000 pages.   If you are selling advertising space, this is what potential buyers will usually want to know.
  2. How many people make it past your homepage.  If you get a visitor to your website, you want them to stay on your site and browse around right?  Measuring how long someone stays on a page before clicking to another page is called the bounce rate.  Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the home page. A high bounce rate generally indicates that site’s homepage isn’t relevant to your visitors.  This is particularly usually is your site is a sales or squeeze page.  If you have a high bounce rate, you probably are not making very many conversions or sales.
  3. What your most popular page is.   By paying attention to your web traffic stats you can find out which pages of your site are the most popular.  If you site is a blog, you may think the page with the most comments is your post popular page.  That’s not always  true.  If you check your stats and find the most popular pages on pages, you can then go back and view the pages to make sure you have properly monetized them or properly emphasized whatever call to action you wish.

Understanding your website traffic analytics can help make your site more popular, rank higher in the search engines, and even more profitable.  I invite you to join me for a workshop designed to help you learn all the ins and outs of Google Analytics.  From monitoring every aspect of your website’s traffic, from visitor loyalty, site referrals, to keywords, Google Analytics provides everything you need to know about your readers and blog stats. Familiarizing yourself with Google Analytics and all that it can do will help you make the best decisions for your website and ultimately your readers.

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6 Comments

  1. Al on August 21, 2010 at 9:57 am

    About bounce rate…for an adsense page to be effective, would you want a high bounce rate?



  2. Lynette Chandler on August 23, 2010 at 5:10 pm

    Hi Alex, theoretically, it would make sense to have a high bounce rate
    on an Adsense page since you want people to click on the ads and thus
    leave the site. But… that is assuming that every bounce is clicking
    on those ads but that's not usually the case. It is a great question
    and I haven't thought about it that way. I'll see what Courtney has to
    say.



  3. Courtney on August 24, 2010 at 1:49 am

    Hi Al,

    This is kind of a tricky question but here is my opinion on it. I think you would want a low bounce rate and here's why. If you have a high bounce rate, it usually means the visitor isn't finding what they looking for so the visitor probably isn't from your target market and most likely won't be making click anyways because the ads are not going to relevant.

    In my experience with running adsense, I had a higher click through rate with a lower bounce rate.

    Hope that helps.



  4. Al on August 24, 2010 at 10:14 am

    Thanks Lynn and Courtney – very interesting to get 2 slightly different angles on this.

    🙂

    Al



  5. Where Can I Get Free Stuff on September 2, 2010 at 4:37 pm

    Hi, really like the look of your blog. Would you be able to tell me what theme you are using? I’m new to this and I’m hoping to get mine looking anywhere near as smart as yours. Thanks a lot.



  6. Laura Stephen on February 1, 2011 at 12:39 am

    Hey, that’s a very helpful post. I’ll be sure to use it.