Turning Web Statistics Into Business Intelligence

Unique Visitors - This is the opposite of a hit and the best way to see how many people are visiting your website. It constitutes the number of actual potential clients visiting your website.

Return Visitor - This is a Unique Visitor who returns to your website within a specified time period. Web stats packages are set differently but lets say that the time is set to 6 hours. It means that if any Unique Visitor comes back to your website within 6 hours they will count as a Return Visitor. This is a great measure showing the popularity of your site, specially valuable when you building an online community.

Page Views - These are the total number of pages that were viewed over a period of time by all visitors. It is a good indicator of the interest shown toward the content of your site.

Visit Duration - The time spent on average in your website by all visitors, also shows the interest generated by your website. We have noted that there is a high correlation between Visit Duration and enquiries, so this is a measurement that needs to be monitored closely every time you make a change to your website.

Entry pages - This stat shows where visitors are entering your website and is a great way to customize each page by adding custom welcome messages.

Exit pages - It is very important to know where your website is losing traffic and to evaluate the exit pages content making several test changes until it starts retaining visitors rather than losing them.

Search words - Some web stats packages make the words used in search engines available in the data. This is a great way to measure the effectiveness of your optimisation campaign, checking whether the correct words are being used.

Operating system - This indicates the operating system used by Visitors and is a good way to check the compatibility of your website with these systems.

Browser share - Similarly it is also important to know what browser people use to view your website and check that it is displayed across used browsers.

Countries - This measures the geographic location of Visitors it is important if you are targeting specific countries.

The are several other "nice to have" stats variables but the above are the most important ones in monitoring the success of a website and will be used in future newsletters.

There are also several words you need to know in order to understand what your SEO consultant is saying:

Visitor conversion - This is when a visitor takes the desired action on your website, be it send an enquiry or purchase online. This is obviously the ultimate objective of the exercise.

Search phrases - These are the phrases used by your target market in search engines when doing a search for your type of products or services.

Key phrases / words - These are the terms you will be researching (from search phrases) and using in the optimisation of your website.

In closing, keep an eye on the above indicators which can transform your web statistics into web business intelligence.