What are your stats? How many hits!

I was recently questioned by a client why their statistics and referrals on their new site had suddenly dropped. Although this is a regular occurrence on new sites - they seemed to be very concerned about it. As anyone would be if they had just invested a lot of money in a new website. I thought I had best explain why this was happening… Here’s an edited copy of the email I sent them.

Stats, look good to me! Don’t forget at the end of ***** and the start of ***** the site was new so lots of additional people would have been visiting it just to check out the new site. So unless you’ve been doing some major marketing that I don’t know about, the stats for ***** are going to be considerably lower than the months before. But looking at your stats your referral rate from search engines has increased over the period by a considerable amount, which I would say is more important than click-through advertising from other sites, because people have specifically searched for keywords. We need to get you advertising on the right sites and places now if you want to continue to grow. The stats are great for analyzing the site to see what people spend the most time looking at and what the most popular pages are, also for if people have problems with any of the pages and where they are coming from. But at the end of the day you only really need potential clients looking at and being able to find the site and that may mean that only say 5-10% of your visitors are the ones you actually want. You need to find a way to monitor the number of people that visit your site in relation to the ones who become clients. If only 1500 people visit your site in a day, but only 100 of them are in a position to be a potential client or are already you can forget about the other 1400 visitors or even have a moan about them for slowing down the site while your clients where viewing it, but then again they might turn round to their ***** friend and recommend you to them . The larger numbers don’t matter, but stats are nice numbers to show off. Maybe your site stats are something your accountant could take into account when doing your books to see if there is a direct correlation between the two.

I’ve always used StatCounter to monitor stats. It allows me to quickly look over all of the 15 plus sites I run in one hit, but I wouldn’t recommend it for business sites with a long-term business plan. If you need your charts and numbers to go with your annual business review I would recommend phpMyVisites as a self-hosted stats system. Google Analytics is clever, but I find it to be a bit overkill and from my past experience I’ve found it slow a sites loading times considerably even with the Google codes at the end of the site code so they load last.

If you’re a small time illustrator stick to StatCounter, but if you’re an Artist or Illustrator for a living you should seriously be using something like phpMyVisites. Look at your paid-for referrals to make sure they are getting the visitors to your site, but more importantly ask the people who commission you how they found your site so you understand how it works, your stats won’t tell you if they found you in a magazine. Look at your books - if your income drops but your hits are on the rise or vice-versa, don’t panic and wonder why! Look closer at them. Look for patterns there may be a direct relation between a rise in traffic from a certain site and an increase in commissions. If 100,000 people visit your site but only one of them becomes a client you’re not attracting the right type of people, also please note everything I’m saying in this post only applies if your site is up-to-scratch and easy to navigate. Numbers don’t matter, people matter!

More importantly networking should be higher up on your agenda that your hit counter, but I’ll talk about that in a future post.