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Your Website Statistics

Using statistics to your advantage

Statistics provide you with information about key aspects of your website such as page views, order information, popular content and so on. The data provided is a simple introduction to visitor habits and should be used in conjunction with more advanced analytical programs such as Google Analytics™.

The information provided by analytical data should be used to ascertain the popularity of pages, making necessary adjustments to content in order to increase page views, click rates, etc.

We recommend that your in-built Website Statistics be used each time you log in to your website Dashboard, and more advanced methods of data analysis be used on a weekly or monthly basis, depending on your website’s overall traffic.

 

On this page

  1. Page Views
  2. Most Popular Pages
  3. Most popular click-through trails
  4. Number of orders
  5. Order revenue
  6. Products sold
  7. Product revenue
  8. Adding custom statistics codes to your website (e.g. Google Analytics™)

FAQ

  1. What does "hits" on my website mean? How can I find how many I have had?

 


Accessing Your in-Built Website Statistics

Your website Dashboard includes in-built statistics that help you better understand how visitors interact with your website. For more in-depth analytics, we recommend that you create a Google Analytics account and install Analytics on your website via your Dashboard.

To access the in-built statistics for your website:

  1. Go to Dashboard > Statistics > Site Statistics
  2. The following information is available via the drop-down menu list Select a stats report.
  3. To view a specific report for a specific time period, make your selections via the drop-down menus then press the View Report button.

Page Views

Page views are generated every time a visitor clicks on a menu item or opens any page on your website (including when pages are refreshed or re-loaded). These numbers will always be quite high.

You should notice significant changes to these numbers when running advertising campaigns that directs visitors to your website.

Most Popular Pages

The most popular pages report displays the page view statistics for each different web page of your site in order of popularity; y our home page will generally be the most popular as most visitors will view the home page first.

It is useful to look at the most popular pages report to understand what products or information on your site is being viewed the most. This can help you to see what the most popular content is, or inform updates to your website. For example, if a certain page or product is not being viewed as much as you would like, it may be because visitors can not find it easily. You can try creating a link to it from a prominent place on your home page or another popular page to see if that improves the amount that it is viewed.

Most popular click-through trails

The click-through trails report shows you the most common ways that visitors move through your website. It can indicate how many clicks it takes visitors to reach your website goal (such as the visitor purchasing a product or sending an enquiry form).

Number of orders

The number of orders report shows you how many orders have been placed on the site during the selected time frame. It includes all orders (manual payment and online payment) except the ones that have an order status of 'Fraudulent', or 'Cancelled'.

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Order revenue 

The order revenue report shows the value of orders made on the website each day of the selected time frame. It includes all orders except where the order status is 'Fraudulent', or 'Cancelled'.

Products sold

The products sold report lists all products that have been purchased for the selected time frame in order of popularity. This report is useful to inform updates to your site and stock list.

Product revenue

The product revenue report shows the amount of income generated from each product ordered during the selected time frame. The value includes all products from all orders regardless of the order status.

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Adding Custom Statistics Codes to Your Website (e.g. Google Analytics™)

Tip: Use Google Analytics

Your Dashboard includes in-built statistics software, but for more comprehensive reporting we recommend that you create a Google Analytics account, install Google Analytics and learn how to use its features.

Google tutorials

Google Analytics is quite the beast to tame but it is by far the most thorough and comprehensive analytics software you can access - for free.

Google offers video tutorials and has plenty of information for beginners to get started. Access Google's Analytics tools and resources at http://www.google.com/analytics/

You can create statistics tracking accounts with a third party software (usually online) to monitor the traffic on your website in high detail. Once you have created an account with the third party software, you will need to add their tracking code to the pages on your website.

You can do this via the custom statistics codes tab. Before beginning this step you must first create a Google Analytics account. You can do so here:  http://www.google.com/analytics/

  1. Copy the Google Analytics code from your Google Analytics account.
  2. Go to Statistics > Custom Statistics Codes.
  3. Paste the code into a Tracking code box.
  4. Select which parts of your website you would like the code to be added to:
  • The entire website including the shop and checkout: The code will be added to every single page that is generated by the CMS. Your Google Analytics account will contain tracking information for all pages.
  • Just the shop section: The code will only be added to category and product pages. This enables you to use a separate code to track visitors activity as they explore your products and categories. 
  • Just the checkout: The code will only be added to pages that the visitor sees as they proceed to make a purchase.  You can add separate code to these pages to track specific ‘conversions' of clicks into sales.
  • Click Save Preferences. Publish your website to update all pages with the Google Analytics code.  

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What does "hits" on my website mean? How can I find how many I have had?

Wikipedia defines a ‘hit' as the following: " A hit is a request for a file from the web server. The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity".

A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website's actual popularity.

The total number of visitors or page views provides a more realistic and accurate assessment of popularity.

Information on the amount of hits on your site is only available in log analysis, you need to contact a member of the support team if you require this information.

Please note that the amount of hits doesn't give you good data on your sites popularity. It is advisable to look at the number of page views and the most popular pages on your site for more realistic and quantifiable information on your websites popularity.

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For free technical support, please contact support@sitesuite.com.au or call (02) 8904 7500