Government of Canada Internet Guide

Statistics

This section uses the term "visitor" instead of "client," to be consistent with the terminology used when discussing Web site statistics.

Statistics are an important tool when you are evaluating your Web initiative. Normally, the person in charge of the server provides statistics. They can be difficult to interpret, as they tend to be very long and technical. Request site access and usage statistics from your site Web master to track who is visiting your site and how they are getting to it.

The number of hits, a common statistic related to Web sites, is actually misleading, since it does not represent the number of visitors. For that reason, you should focus on the number of pages viewed. Knowing that most visitors view between five and 10 pages during a visit, you can estimate the actual number of visitors.

Compare each weekly or monthly traffic report to the previous one. A comparative analysis should raise important questions, which will guide future improvements. For example, can you explain increases or decreases in the number of Web site visitors?

If you are serious about site maintenance, promotion and marketing, you must use a Web site statistics tool. You will also need a reliable traffic analysis tool to determine your total hits, the number of visitors coming to your site, the path they've followed to reach your site and other important visitor information.

Monitoring Statistics

You will probably come across the following terms while analyzing your statistics.

Visitor: A visitor is a unique person who visits your site. He or she may view many pages on your site but will be counted as only one person.

Hit or page view: This refers to the number of times someone accesses a particular page on your Web site. For instance, every time you click on one of your links, your number of hits will increase by one.

Referrer domain: This is the URL through which a visitor comes to your site. It could be a search engine, a directory or just another site that has linked to you. Using referrer information, you can determine how your visitors find you and which sites generate the most traffic for you. It is also a useful way to find out whether your site is indexed and highly ranked on a particular search engine. As soon as visitors start coming to your site through a particular search engine, you know that you are indexed and highly ranked. If you find that you aren't getting visitors from certain search engines, even after your site has been up for two or three months, your site is probably not indexed in their databases or not highly ranked.

Statistics by monitored page: These statistics will show you the number of hits for each of your pages, and will help you determine your most popular and least popular pages. Use your popular pages to draw visitors to your site. Give visitors a special offer or use cool links to encourage them to visit the rest of your site. Revise unpopular pages.

These are some of the important statistics you must consider. Others include hourly statistics, information on visitors' browsers and platforms, statistics by location, and weekly and monthly statistics. You need to track this useful information regularly to see whether your numbers of hits and visitors are increasing, decreasing or remaining stagnant.

Check whether the number of pages viewed on your site is much higher than the number of visitors to your site. If it is, your visitors are interested in what your site has to offer and are moving around the site. If the two numbers are almost the same, or if the number of pages viewed is just double the number of visitors, then visitors may be viewing only one or two pages and then leaving your site.

Statistics Evaluation