How to Read Your Website Statistics

If you host your website with Emagine, you already have access to your website statistics program. Emagine clients enjoy the ease of use that Urchin offers in its statistics program for sorting your website traffic data. In addition to being able to find out how many visitors you get each day, month or year, Urchin also provides data on which pages in your site are the most popular, least popular, where your referrals are coming from and which keywords visitors are using to find you in the search engines.

Once you've logged into your Urchin stats account the first place I like to go is "Traffic" and then choose "Summary". You'll see the summary for the last week's worth of traffic to your site. I usually want to look at a larger date range than that, so I put in my own date range in the "Enter Range" section on the lower left bar. Once you've chosen your dates, choose "Apply Date Range". I usually ignore "hits" as this is an over-inflated number because it includes spiders and robots that visit your site as well as counting all of the images/files downloaded by each visitor looking at your page. The more accurate number is "Sessions" and "Average Sessions Per Day" - this tells you how many unique visitors you had and an average per day for the time frame you chose.

By choosing "Page & Files" and then "Requested Pages" you can view, in order of popularity, the pages of your site with corresponding traffic data. If you'd like to see who is sending traffic to your site, choose "Referrals". This provides an ordered list of other websites that are linked to yours that send traffic to your site. "No referral" means people that type in your domain name directly into a browser, that didn't find your site through another site or search engine/directory. If you are paying for any kind of directory listing for your website, this is a great way to see if you are getting referrals/traffic to justify the cost of the listings.

I also like to check out "Search Terms" under the "Referrals" section. This tells you what terms visitors are using to find you in the search engines. This may give you clues as to what new content to add to your website, so that you are sure to give your visitors what they are looking for. Urchin is a very powerful program and these are just a few of it's many features. I hope this helps give you the confidence to log in and surf around in the Urchin program a bit, it's really quite user-friendly and interesting. As you navigate through Urchin you'll also find a great deal of explanation on the various terms you'll encounter that will help you to understand the data that is available. Please feel free to contact Emagine iif you need help or further assistance.