Web statistics

When your website is live on the World Wide Web, you will mostly likely want to see statistics on how well the website is doing. How well a website is doing can measured in various ways. With the appropriate statistics available, you should be able to deduce any actions that need to be taken to better reach your target audience (See the next section: improving rankings).

One great, free open source tool, which we use and endorse, for viewing website statistics is AWStats. Ask your website developer if AWStats is available to you or if it can be made available to you.

An important aspect of website statistics to understand is the relationships between the number of site visitors, the number of site visits and the number of page visits. The number of visits does not necessarily tell us how many people found the site useful.

You should observe the ratios between visits and pages, which will give you an average of the number of pages a user looked at while they visited the site. Whether this ratio is good or not will depend on the number of pages your site has. I.e. a site with 15 pages and an average of one page visit per site visit might tell you that there is either a problem with your users being able to navigate your site, little interest in the site or perhaps they just got everything they needed from that one page.

The number of hits determines the number of elements (Files) of a site that are accessed. This information is mainly relevant to the website developer / maintainer. The amount of bandwidth refers to how much data has been downloaded from the site.

The following table outlines some major useful features of AWStats:

Name	Description
Monthly history, Days of month, Days of week, Hours	These sections show recorded information on numbers of visits, pages, hits and amounts of bandwidth. They each show totals for each type of time period (Month, Week, Day, Hour), with appropriate graphs.
Countries	An important statistic to know is what country your users are viewing your site from.
Visits duration	A breakdown of how long a user spends viewing your website.
Pages-URL	See what are the most commonly visited pages on your website.
Connect to site from	This section is very useful, telling you what where people have come from on the World Wide Web to get to your website.
Search Keyphrases, Keywords	You can see the top search terms and phrases people have typed into search engines to come across your website.