Statistics Collection
Real-Time Statistical Tracking - Visits log tracks Visitors to the website.
- Search Referrals from Major Search engines are analyzed.
- Spider Log Monitors search spiders crawls.
- Ajax framework captures anonymous user information.
- Edit log keeps records of user edits to site content.
Statistics are tightly integrated within the processes of this website. Modern techniques such as cookie tracking, search engine analysis, affiliate tracking, transaction accounting, commerce statistics and user account specific statistics are detailed below.
Visits
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Visits
This website tracks an individuals visit to the website. Visits cannot be considered the same as hits, as hits are an older terminology used by server log analysis programs for the purpose of understanding mechanical optimization of a web page rather than a user or person visiting the website. Sometimes it may seem your website may be receiving less traffic than many of your peers websites, they are in fact not when they refer to their statistics as hits. Visitor statistics are meaningful.
The most significant difference between traditional statistics programs and modern statistics programs is their ability to track return users to the website through the use of cookies. The above chart illustrates the number of return visitors to a site over a twenty month period. Simply put, this can be interpreted as your loyalty factor. The more people returning to your site on a regular basis can mean marketing efforts in combination with word of mouth, employee retention and overall customer satisfaction or interest is paying off. Return visits represent unique visits to a website. If one person returns to your site five times over the course of a month it will be counted five times.
Within the visits section each tracked visitor to the site will display in a row view. All visitors including automated robots will display here. Clicking on the view button will take you to a very detailed description of what actions that visitor performed while visiting the website. Automated visitors such as the GoogleBot are not considered return visitors.
Search Strings
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Search Strings
The Search Strings section is repsonsible for giving a general overview of all the visitors to the website and where they are originating from.
Traffic Frequencies
Traffic frequencies show daily volume information for return visitors, total visitors, search referrals, affiliate referrals, and newsletter referrals over a 30 day period. Depending on the nature of your site you may see dips which occur during the weekends due to your audience being more interested in your site during normal business days. Large spikes are almost always due to media exposure or marketing campaigns. Traffic frequencies can be very susceptible to seasonal trends as well. Visitors may be more inclined to visit your site during the Christmas shopping season should you be a commerce style website and traffic interest may drop during the summer should your website not appeal to the more recreation minded. Should you not make use of the built in newsletter marketing software or the affiliate programs available to this website those frequencies will flat line. Three very different frequency patterns are shown in the image. Your site is prone to unique influencing factors which will set you apart from everyone else.
Bounce Rates / Time Estimates and Averages
When a user visit is tracked across the website, there is a time recorded between each page request. This information is used to determine how long the user is spending on the website. If a user is away from their keyboard for long periods of time and they remain on the website this can certainly inflate these time averages. As a general rule the bounce rate statistics are of the most interest as a bounce is recorded when a user requests one and only one page before leaving your site. Bounces can be interpreted to mean that people are either finding exactly what they want, and everything they want, with the first page requested or the website is failing to capture the interest of the user. Advertisements on the website may capture the users attention and cause them to leave as well.
Search Engines
This section breaks down the volume of search referrals between the most popular search engines. Recent search phrases are listed in row views. Clicking on search term will take you to the search engine page where you are listed and where that visitor came from. Very often a search engine page will update over the course of day/week and you may not find your site listed where it was at one point. Search engines often customize their pages to show relevant regional results, or personal preferences which may further distort your perception as to where you rank.
Keyword Referrals
A list which tallies the last 30 days of search referral strings. These are the words and phrases that your visitors are using in their search query when they find your site through a search engine such as Yahoo, Msn or Google. The Phrases column is a real list of every unique phrase and the Words column is a breakdown of unique words within those phrases. These lists can serve a dual purpose to determine the popularity of your brand name should your brand name be a unique search term which people have taken an active interest in learning more about. It can also serve the purpose to define the range and diversity of topics on your site and how much interest they hold to the general population at large.
Referrals
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Referrals
The referral section lists the visitors who have been referred to your site from links seeded throughout the web. This could be from popular social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook, Myspace or it could be from affiliate referrals, web mail inboxes or redirect services like Tiny url.
The chart above shows the total number of referrals which have not come from the major search engines such as Yahoo, Msn and Google for the last 20 months. Differences in this reading reflect the total exposure your site receives from other web sites. A rise in this section could mean that more advertisements have been purchased for that month, that more bloggers have begun to promote your material, or that your affiliates have been performing extraordinarily well. The large differentiations from one month to the next given in this example is the result of a link placed on a very well established and high trafficked website which essentially resulted in a large number of additional visitors to the site. The overall steady increase in volume may be interpreted as word of mouth advertising in the form of links placed within social networking websites or an increase in affiliate marketing activity. Your marketing efforts will produce different results depending on which route you choose to take. Referrals which come from your affiliates will be indicated with an affiliate links icon in the row views.
Browser Stats
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Browser Stats
When someone visits the website, information about the type of computer they are using, the quality/resolution of their monitor display, the operating system they are using along with the type of browser are recorded. This can be useful should you want to learn more about the optimum size to design your website to cater most effectively to the largest cross section of users. Personal information about a user such as their email, phone number and other forms of personally identifying information cannot and are not collected unless they are voluntarily relinquished through a form submission.
Spider Log
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Spider Log
The spider log records how automated robots such as the GoogleBot, MsnBot and the Yahoo Slurp web crawler interface with your website. It is purely a mechanical process which can give insight as to which pages are of the most interest to a search engine. A search engine may frequent and keep more recent copies of pages it feels are of the most interest to the people who are using their search services.
Log
Location Admin :: Site Statistics :: Log
The log is responsible for recording editing decisions made against the website. Whenever someone edits a page, sends out a notification, resets a password, or logs into the system it is recorded here. This section serves as a dual role to the developer to track unusual behavior and to track down problems which may arise. All systems are built with redundant backup systems in place. Data integrity is of the utmost importance for the long term success of this website and errors which can be found in this section are indeed fixable, they should not be considered problematic in all circumstances.
Campaign History
Location Newsletter :: Campaign History
The campaign history can be found in the newsletter section. It details the success rate of a newsletter sent out via email from the website. It tracks the number of people who visit the site by clicking a link in the newsletter as well as the people who open it.
The chart above shows the total newsletter views over the course of 24 months. When a user receives an email via their email reader the images are downloaded from the website. This enables the website to track when a newsletter has been opened and by who. You have option to disable this style of statistics collection should you want to bypass privacy filters by embedding the images directly within the newsletter itself, preventing the images from being downloaded from the website. This volume graph is not dependent on the time the newsletter was sent. For example, a newsletter which was sent out in April but opened and read by a user in March would count as one hit towards the month of march.
Listed in this section are the general tally counts of each campaign. The large H column counts the number of times the newsletter has been opened by recipients. The large V column counts the number of people who have visited the website as a result of clicking on link embedded within the newsletter. The opt out column counts the number of people who have unsubscribed from the newsletter as a result of clicking the un-subscribe button embedded within the newsletter.
Accounts
Location Admin :: Accounts
Within the account section of this site, statistics are recorded and credited towards individual users once they have been identified through the means of submitting a form or purchasing a product through the shopping cart. With the exception of the affiliate statistics the majority of this section attempts to list all the details of all the events that user has been accredited to.
Affiliate Statistics
Affiliate statistics are integrated within the website itself and the behavior of the web analytics is very similar to the normal methods of tracking users through the use of cookies and IP addresses.
Detailed statistics for each user can be found in the user manager. A brief explanation of each type of statistic is given below.
Sales
A sale is recorded whenever a form which requires payment is submitted to the site and the submitter has previously been tracked with an affiliate cookie.
Bounces
A bounce is recorded when a sale has been requested but no payment has been made. This may occur if a user does not provide a third party credit card processing system with payment.
Reach
The total number of unique websites an affiliate banner has been placed.
Remote Views
The number of times an affiliate banner has been viewed on all remote websites.
New Referrals
The number of Unique Visitors which have been referred to the website by clicking an affiliate link or after they have seen an affiliate banner.
Referrals
The number of Visits total which have been referred to the website by clicking an affiliate link or after they have seen an affiliate banner.
Local Views
The number of website pages viewed by visitors who have previously been recognized as a referral.
Unique IPs
The number of unique IPs
Poached
The number of times an affiliate has stolen a potential customer from other affiliates. Only one affiliate can be attributed the commission on a sale. A visitor who views affiliate banners belonging to two different affiliates will have the first cookie overwritten by the second affiliates cookie.
Lost by Interception
The number of times an affiliate has had their cookie stolen by another affiliate.
