18 November 2011
If you collect the right information on your website, you will be able to make more informed choices as to how to move it forward, and all websites should be progressing frequently.

The days are long gone when you expect to see a hit counter on a website. You may remember such counters, and had endless fun reloading the webpage and seeing the counter increase. These almost iconic counters were removed because they were not useful. There are now many different ways to monitor how well your website is doing, but are they really any different from the old website counters? I am sure the monitors collect a lot of information, but do you benefit from it other than knowing how many times people have viewed your site?

If your car has a flat tyre, do you think changing its colour would help? What about replacing the exhaust? Many businesses unknowingly approach a website in this way - if it is not performing, surely it is that green text which you have never been happy with. This way of thinking is not only non-sensical, it also leads to unnecessary changes and dissatisfaction. You can avoid this by better understanding your website statistics.

If you concentrate on collecting the right information then you will be able to make more informed choices. The following list is a good place to start:

How many visitors do you have on a four-weekly basis?

How long on average does a user spend on your site?

What percentage of your visitors leave your site without taking a look around?

How many other websites link to you?

Do you have clear goals and know how many are completed?

What are the top search phrases that people find your site by?

Where do your visitors originate from?

In order to diagnose a problem, you need to know exactly what is happening. The information suggested above will allow you to get an idea of how your site is performing, but you can delve deeper. You could find out what pages are your most popular - perhaps a lot of your users are leaving your site at a specific page.

If you are not getting enough business from your site, consulting your website statistics will allow you to find that simple typo which has made your product more expensive - rather than changing that green you don’t like.

There are many popular website analytics packages available. Some packages use javascript to track your visitors, others read your server logs. There are advantages and disadvantages to both; some very thorough companies use both methods, although this is often unnecessary for smaller companies.

At AFX Design, we use Google Analytics because it is free and quite frankly very good. One feature Google has decided not to include can cause some controversy, which is the storing of the visitor's IP addresses, which in some cases is used to track down which company they are visiting from. Many SEO advocates agree that the use of such data can be a breach of your visitor's privacy - after all, just because they happened to visit your site doesn’t mean that they would be happy if you were to contact them. As a result I would be very wary of deciding to use a package which allows you to see such information. If you do, does your privacy policy make it clear that you are collecting this information? Is there a way that your visitors can opt out of this?

In this article I have only skimmed the surface of website analytics. I hope that you might use this article to get an idea of how to get started. Business support groups such as Business Link often provide basic Search Engine Optimisation courses which include website analytics. There are plenty of books available and resources on the internet to digest. However, I would strongly recommend considering employing a professional service - after all, your livelihood may count on the success of your website.