It takes more than a lot of "hits"

Do you review your website stats? You should have access to data that shows various activity on your website. These statistics should be available in the backend of your site or accessed on the hosting server.

What I hear often is comments from a site owner or business owner about how many hits they are getting. The total number is nice but there are more important figures to concern yourself with. For example, it is really the amount of unique visitors that counts. Each unique visitor is an individual that came to your site. How many pages they clicked through will determine the number of hits.

With most systems you can see the average number of pages visited by each individual but here are the two most important figures to concern yourself with in my opinion.

First, you should be able to find out what pages were most visited. This information will tell you what pages are getting the most attention and you can determine if that is where you want your visitors to focus their attention.

Second, how much time did visitors spend looking at the pages on your site. See what the percentages are for the amount of time spent looking at your site. Hopefully your stats can show that. You might see that visitors are on your site for less than 30 seconds, 30 seconds to 2 minutes, 2 to 5 minutes, 5 to 15 minutes, 15 to 30 minutes or even more. If your site is what they are really looking for and you have quality content you can expect your visitors to spend 2 to 5 minutes reading and looking around. 2 to 5 minutes is an ideal amount of time for them to get interested and make a call-to-action right away (either contact you or make a purchase). If they spend too much time they may be comparing with other sites or stepped away, hopefully they bookmarked you. If site visitors spend very little time on your site you have some questions to think about. Is there enough content or is the site designed properly? By design I mean not just the aesthetics and layout but how information is organized and presented. Another big question is whether your SEO (search engine marketing) and on-site optimization are mis-leading? Are you driving the wrong visitors to your site?

Website statistics are also important to evaluate how effective your sales and marketing promotions are. You should be able to access a variety of other reports, such as: which search engines are generating the most traffic for your site, which keywords are resulting in the greatest number of hits and where most of your hits are coming from. Without usage data like this, you'll have a difficult time making informed decisions about the effectiveness of your website and marketing.


Freddy Uson is the Creative Director and owner of Uson Consulting, llc. Visit usonconsulting.com A Web Design & Creative Marketing business that offers web design, development, e-commerce, SEO and site optimization, marketing and all print collateral. Based in the Central New Jersey, Princeton, NJ area and serving all of NY/NJ. Contact us at (551) 265-8762 or email info@usonconsulting.com