Business Website Statistics

Website statistics are misunderstood by many business owners. It’s essential that you understand a few things your web statistics program is telling you. I’ll go over a few things here and then if you’re still interested in learning more you can sign up for one of our elearning courses where I’ll cover quite a bit more on website statistics. (in a couple months – writing courses now).

Website statistics and what they mean. I use Google’s Analytics and Godaddy statistics for all of my sites and they give me two different pictures of the same thing. No two stats programs ever seem to match up. Godaddy.com stats are enabled in your Godaddy hosting control panel using the “enable statistics” icon. Once enabled you can see your stats by using your hosting login and password when asked after going to: http://www.yoursite.com/stats/

Godaddy’s stats are pretty basic, yet they give part of the picture.

What I count on though is Google Analytics. This requires a bit of code on each page of your site and is very accurate. They tell a lot more about your site than does Godaddy, and it’s also free to use.

Here are some basic business website (or personal) statistics terms and what they really mean:

Bounce Rate – This tells you that, of the total number of visitors that come to your site – this percentage bounce right back off – like they jumped on the moon and sprung away with no gravity. If your bounce rate is over 60% or so – that’s getting high. Some business websites have 75% bounce rate. Some have more and some have 25%. Bounce rate is a function of  a lot of different things… the design of your business site and how well Google, another search engine – or another website is qualifying what the surfer wants when he/she arrives at your business site.

Hits – Hits means nothing. Please don’t even look at hits. It could literally mean anything, depending on your stats package. Instead, look at unique visitors and pageviews or unique pageviews.

Unique visitors – the number of unique people that visited your site. This is not 100% infallible as you will have multiple visitors that used different computers to come to your site.

Pageviews – the number of times your page was shown to a visitor – this is after the bounce rate is taken into account. Godaddy shows before the bounce rate is taken into account. So, for example… At Godaddy one of our sites gets 3700 pageviews per day. Google shows only about 1000 per day.

Contrary to some opinion, you don’t need thousands of people per day at your site to make money with your online business or business website. If you had 100 well-targeted visitors arrive at your site everyday that could be enough. Try hard to convert visitors to join your email list by offering something for free in exchange for them joining your list. You’ll have continued opportunities to promote ideas, conversation and things you’re selling if you’re able to email them over time.