stuff to read, apparently/june 2010

anyone there?

or perhaps more relevantly anyone looking at your site?

one thing which still surprises me about some potential clients is that they’ve no idea about visitor traffic on their site, or even that such analysis is possible.

This isn’t their fault of course, especially if they’re new to the web, but it’s a bit depressing how many existing site owners remain in the dark. Either the stats packages they can access are completely impenetrable, or their existing web designers haven’t explained such things are possible.

Count them in, count them back out again.…

These visitor stats are damned handy. In fact I’d say they’re pretty much essential if you’re going to base your ongoing site development on anything other than guesswork. There are various services available, some like Google Analytics, are free; others, like my generally preferred option, Irish company StatCounter, are a paid service (but if you get your web hosting from me, I include it as part of your hosting package).

There’s a lot of info available, including what people typed into Google (or any other search engine) to find your site, what the ‘landing page’ was for that specific search, plus:

How many?

The screengrab below, for instance, shows visitors to one client’s for the last week in May 2010. So on Wednesday, for example, they had a total of 135 visitors (six of whom had visited the site previously) who viewed a total of 477 pages.

statcounter01

Where from?

Next one shows where visitors have come from, ie. if they've clicked a link on another site. If you’re posting news articles elsewhere or paying for ‘click-through’ ads on other sites, you can see whether they’re generating any traffic and whether it was money well spent.

statcounter02

What are they looking at?

A visitor from Belgium looked at 11 pages, a visitor from Dundee (not me, I’m not with Telewest) looked at 15 pages. Actually, it definitely wasn’t me, because all the tracking is configured not to count me. More importantly, you can even follow each visitor’s path through the site, so you can identify which pages they looked at, how long for and so on.

On each site this can be summarised to show most (and least) popular pages – so you can see how useful this sort of data can be, particularly with regard to modifying which areas of your site are getting the most (or least) attention.

statcounter03

I was just typing thinking…

corporate + brand identity | graphic design | website design | dog walking

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