Interpreting Website Statistics

Which statistics should you use and what they mean

How do you define a successful website? The answer is that it depends largely on what the purpose of the site is and what you want it to achieve.

If you are running an advertising campaign and want people to merely be exposed to the name of your product, then the total number of visitors to your site will define success.

If you are however selling a product or service then whilst the number of visitors to the site will be an indicator of success, the statistics you will really need to ascertain and examine are the clicks-to-sales ratio, and seeing what percentage of leads you are converting into sales.

The first thing to consider is that you should try to be consistent with the statistics that you use. Some people talk in hits, others in impressions, visits, unique visits and so on.

The most useful of these is probably identifying the number of visits to the site, and the number of impressions. An impression is a viewing of a page, so if you look at five pages on the site that is five impressions, whilst you are one visitor to the site. If you come back again later in the day then that counts as another visit, unless you are measuring unique visitors in which case you are the same person as on your second visit you are not unique.

The most misleading is probably hits, as when any asset is downloaded on a page this is a hit. Thus with the stylesheet, five or six images and the HTML to download you can get six or seven hits per page and even numbers around twenty or so are not uncommon. Therefore if you make the mistake of translating hits into visitors then you will overestimate your traffic and perhaps be confused as a result.

One of the most useful reports you can use when deciding if your site is a success is the user journeys report - this is the report that shows you common user journeys through the site.

Success and User Journeys

If your users are using your site as you want them to, then you should see that the most common user journeys are the ones you want them to take.

If I'm selling a product I might have a big advert for a special offer on the homepage taking people through to a page of details for that product and a nice, healthy large 'buy me now' button.

Now for that campaign to be successful, I would like to see in the user journey stats lots of people following that route: homepage --> special offer info --> sales process

If that user journey is indeed reflected healthily in the percentages then I can define that as success. If it is not, then I can ask why hardly anyone is following that journey, make some changes to the site (more attractive offer, explaining the benefits of the product over the features) and then seeing what happens.

This means we introduce some science into our site and the pages therein - don't just make a change and have no idea what happens, but rather make a change and measure if there is some improvement in click through rates and sales.

Optimising Sales Processes: Drop off Rates

With sales processes, you will want to look at the drop off rate at each stage of the process. A drop of around 50% is expected; if only 1% or 2% of people are moving from one stage to another in a process, then there is something putting people off.

Maybe you have a tiny link saying 'buy now' that people are missing, or your validation requirements are so stringent that virtually everyone gives up rather than finding the one combination that the over-zealous designer decided constituted a valid postcode.

Remember particularly if you are having international orders that whilst of course you want to validate all data entered that formats vary across the world so you need to be flexible enough. This sort of error is hard to spot but can cost a lot of business, which is why looking at your website stats is so important as it can trigger and inform 'why is this happening?' type questions.

In summary, to get the most from a website and continually improve it, it really is essential that you spend the time analysing your important site data and stats and learn from them and what they tell you.

For more information on getting the most from your statistics and setting up tracking of your website, please get in touch with Clarity Media.

Interpreting Website Statistics

Author: Dan

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Last Updated: Sep 6th 2006

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