Your Weekly Statistics:
Why the report? What does it show? Can I get more details?

Each week, bright and early Sunday morning, you will receive an e-mail from us. This e-mail will have the heading: Executive Report for the Week Of dd/mm/yyyy --- yourweb. The dd/mm/yyyy is the first day of the week for that report. (Our statistics software is from a Canadian company, so they list the day first). The "yourweb" is replaced by the name of your website. This e-mail is a recap of the statistics of visitors to your website. We offer this service as part of our basic web hosting package and there is no extra charge for it. We also offer an enhanced statistics package that allows you to see how many people are visiting your website "live," as well as prepare various past reports spanning the past year's visits to your website.

The report is a weekly summary of visitors to your website for the past week starting from Sunday morning at 12:01am through the following Saturday night at midnight. You can see how many people visited your website, how many pages they looked at and how long they stayed. The report also shows which pages they looked at the most, and which they looked at the least, and how they got there, among other things.

The biggest question most people have is "how many people visited my website?" Ironically, it's also the one question no one can truthfully answer correctly, but we can make some educated guesses. That's what the "visits" figures represent on your report. The "total number of visits" is an estimate of how many different times someone visited your web site.

"Total hits made on the server" is what you often here people quoting, but it's a misleading number. Each graphic and each page counts as a hit. For example, but looking at this page, you have added at least seven hits to our "hits" count -- one for our logo at the top, five for the five navigation buttons on the left and one for the text. (In reality, you actually created 12 hits because each button on the left is actually two buttons. One you see when the page loads, the other you see when you scroll your mouse over the button).

So, hits is probably not the most reliable indication of your website's popularity when trying to compare it to someone else. The more little graphics you put on your page, the more "hits" you will get, but they are all still just one page. And this brings us to the next item, total page views. Page views is actually the first section on your report and is arguably the most important section on the report. Page views tell you how many actual pages people looked at. Page views should always be greater than visits if your website has more than one page. If the two numbers are close, that means many people are only looking at your home page and are not looking deeper.

Now, spend a moment to look over your weekly report and familiarize yourself with each section Each of the items can be useful to you in planning your website and any revisions you might have. For example, if the majority of your visitors only looked at one page of your website and did not stay long, perhaps it's time to modernize and update that page to get them to stay around. (The technical term for this is "stickiness." Although there is some debate on this issue, generally it is agreed that the more "sticky" your website, the more successful it is).

An important use of the statistics is to determine how people are getting to your website. We have greatly expanded the information we show on the referrals section of your report. You can now see how people got to your site, through which search engine, or if they came directly. You can see which keywords they used for their search, etc. If the vast majority of people are not using search engines, then it means they had to find out about your site in some other way -- such as from your business cards, newspaper ads, or word of mouth. If you are a retail business, you will want your non-Internet marketing campaigns to draw attention to your website, but you would also want high visibility on the search engines. With the referrer activity analysis, you can see who referred a visitor to you -- was it a search engine or another directory? Do you belong to an association? If so, are they referring people to you?

Can I get more info?

Well, glad you asked. Sure. We have other optional services that provide you a password to  access the web statistics server directly. From there you can see graphs of trends for up to the past year, or over an hourly basis. You can get more detailed reports of all kinds. We even have available a "Who's On" report that will actually show you how many people are looking at your website at the time you are checking the statistics. Not only can you see how many, but you can see where they are dialing in from. If you're interested in our enhanced statistics services, let us know. Just send an e-mail to info@johnsonservices.com or give us a call at (727) 561-9333.

Johnson Services