There are lots of different website statistic packages available for webmasters to use to monitor the use of their websites. But do you know what you are measuring?

There are many different ways of measuring people’s use of your website including pageviews, visitors and unique visitors. Some people only care about showing the biggest numbers to their visitors so will show a visitor count based on pageviews, but is that really how you should measure your traffic?

You shouldn’t use a stats package to show off to others on the internet – it should be used to understand your own visitors. Google Analytics is free to everyone and offers an excellent analysis of your site. Not only that, you can choose to exclude IP addresses. I would always suggest blocking your own IP address to make sure you don’t get artificially inflated figures.

Learning to use Google Analytics to your advantage can take time as there is a lot of information to take in. You need to take time to understand what the different metrics are telling you.
For example, if you have a page that has a high bounce rate*, you can deduce that either the user found what they required on that page so didn’t need to visit any more pages, or more likely the page didn’t answer their query so they just left the site.
It is then down to you to analyse your page and decide if the content is wrong, the keywords you are targeting are wrong etc.

You need to be aware that Analytics will not tell you what to do – only what is happening!

If you only use one stats package, I would suggest using Google Analytics. If you need help analysing the results, there are lots of web professionals out there who use this package everyday. All new websites that are built by SpiderServe incorporate a Google Analytics account.

*Bounce rate – people enter the website on that page and then leave without navigating away from that one page.