Ignore your visitors

Visitor counts and page views do not provide useful information when analysing visitors to your site when not used alongside other details. Statistical reporting needs to involve analysis, not copy & paste.

It’s not that page view counts are not useful. But using only the page views to judge your site performance is a mistake.

Site visitors/page views

A visitor is counted when they enter your site and when they enter each new page. From this, you can assume certain things:

It tells you:

• Your metadata is well written so that when searching for a key phrase, somebody found your site
• Your chosen topic is interesting, to prompt the visitor to search for the key phrase

It doesn’t tell you:

• If they found what they were looking for
• If they found the page well written and interesting

Used in conjunction with visitor source, it could be used to judge content quality. If you get a visitor as a result of another website linking to you, then this can suggest your content is relevant and interesting. Used on its own, however, the informative value is very low.

Bounce rates

A ‘bounce’ is when somebody enters your site, and leaves without visiting any other page on your site. Either they follow an external link, they click their back button or they close their browser.

It tells you:

• How many people are leaving without showing interest in other areas of your site

It doesn’t tell you:

• Why they left your site
• What they were looking for
• Whether they found what they wanted

It’s really important to understand your visitor’s motivations before analysing any metric. If somebody has searched for something specific and found it on your website, all on one easy to understand page and then left, then great. A bounce does not have to be a bad thing.

Visitor loyalty

Building a page that completely fulfils somebody’s needs will raise their visitor loyalty. People will appreciate your site for being so easy to use and come back when they need to.

Whilst exceptions do need to be considered, improvements can still be made after analysis. If you have a page that has a very high bounce rate but also maintains a high visitor return rate, maybe an email newsletter or RSS feed of the content on the page would be a useful format to your reader.

Learn more

Avinash Kaushik hosted a really informative seminar for Google, Authors@Google: Avinash Kaushik, it’s well worth checking out if you want to find out more.