Can you put a visitor counter on the web site?

Many of these geek speak articles are directly from my bag ‘o FAQs (frequently asked questions. So here is a question I was asked at least 2x last month…. “When you build my new site can you put a visitor counter on the web site?”

My answers goes a little something like this.

Yes, we can….but, there is an even better idea.

A web site visitor counter IS a visual way to show you the popularity or your web site. Unfortunately, they are terribly inaccurate AND everyone sees the results. A more modern approach is to have web site statistics. Here is what I like about website stats.

1. They are private. Only people with your account password can view your stats. Your visitors and your competitors don’t need to know your sites popularity.
2. Stats can show very detailed and specific information (more on this later)
3. Stats are archived over time so you can compare results chronologically. Let’s talk about stats. In order to view stats you first need to have a stats program or two installed. Ask your web host what they provide, if they don’t already have some installed I recommend you take a look at Google Analytics. For the sake of this article I’m not going to focus on any one stats program, but on the basics of what they record and what it all means.

When I hear people bragging out the web stats the will often talk about hits. They might say, “My site had 100,000 hits last month!”.

It sounds impressive, but what does it mean? The short answer is hits are just big numbers to impress people who don’t know what numbers really matter. But, this number won’t impress you because YOU are more interested in “Unique Visitors”, “Number of Visits”, Page Views, Hits & Bandwidth.

Unique Visitors: is a computer that goes to your site during a current time period. So if I visit your site, I will be tracked as a Unique Visitor. (Who are you calling unique, ha ha). If I like your site and return an hour later to your site, my “Visits” will be tracked and your stat software will recognize me as the same unique visitor as before. So your stats have recorded 1 Unique Visitor and 2 Visits. It will further tell you that while I was at your site I visited the following pages, home, about us, services & contact. Each Page view was tracked. Page view = 4.

If you are new to stats then just focus on the big 3. Unique Visitors, Visits & Page views – you will learn a ton about your web site. If you’re feeling geeky read on about more stats.

Skipping hits, we move on to Bandwidth. Bandwidth is total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by web browsing. So a graphical rich page with PDFs to download and video to steam uses more bandwidth that a mostly text page.

Two sites with similar Unique Visitors, Visits & Page Views can have drastically different bandwidth based on the sites content. Here are a few more things you can learn. Entry Page is the first page people view when coming to your site, often it is the home page, but when people link directly to a certain page or when the your found in the search engines, you will have a variety of Entry Pages. You can also track the Exit Page which is the last page viewed before the left you site. Session Duration tells how long a person spent on your site site.

Most stats will show you if they (visitors) came there direct or if they can from a bookmark. Graphs can so what days of the week and even hours of the day are most visited. Pages outline how many views each page received, Referrers shows the addresses that people came from to get to your site, Search even shows the keywords and keyphrases people used to find you in the various search engines. Those are the highlights.

My 4 cents is to get a copy of your stats for last month and sit down with your favorite beverage and learn how many people are visiting your site and what they are doing during their visit. Compare to previous months and years. Do you like the progress? The stats can give you wisdom to connecting with more people. Want to learn more? Let’s us know.

So now if I tell you that CowlitzToday.com (or any site) has 500,000 hits this month, you will say cool, but how many unique visitors are you getting? And I will tell you…. hey wait, you didn’t ask. ~:-)

Adding Video to Your Web Site

I have a great job. As a web site developer and consultant I have the opportunity to continually learn about new technology. The last 2 years have been especially exciting as the web has become more powerful and potentially easier to use.
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