We talked a bit about web statistics goals and looked at web statistics software, so let’s start looking at some statistics themselves. As mentioned in previous posts, what the statistics will mean depends on the purpose of your website. Looking at things from a photography perspective, today we’ll talk about hits, entry pages, and bounce rate.
Hits (and Uniques)
Hits is a term used to describe each time a visitor loads a page on a website. When a visitor loads your homepage, that’s a hit. If he then navigates to your gallery page, that’s another hit. The larger the number of hits, the more pages on your website that are being loaded. Because one visitor could equal many hits, there’s a qualifying term that’s used: unique hits (or unique visitors). That measures distinct visits, so that one person who happened to peruse 28 of your pages would only be recorded as one unique visitor.
Hits are good, since in general you’ll want your website to have as much traffic as possible, but as a standalone measure they aren’t that important. Your website’s number of hits should trend upward over time, but the exact number isn’t really meaningful.
Entry Pages
Entry pages are fairly straightforward: what pages are folks using to enter (arrive at) your website? Are most of your visitors starting out on your homepage? Are they landing on a gallery or contact page as the beginning of their time on your site? Are they coming in via your blog?
Entry pages matter because it’s important that your site’s visitors can find their way around once they get to your site. You probably designed your site such that navigation is very obvious from the homepage, but what if people arrive via your blog? What if you have a very popular sub-page and a bunch of traffic arrives starting there? Can people find their way to other sections of your site? How do you know if your entry pages might need some help? That leads us to the next statistic for the day…
Bounce Rate
The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who arrive on your site and then leave without visiting any other pages. Generally the goal is to have visitors spend some time on your website, so you’ll want a bounce rate percentage that is fairly low. It’s hard to peg a goal for a bounce rate that applies to all sites; depending on the purpose of your site (and how folks usually arrive), varying levels of bounce rate are acceptable. I’ve found that on websites with most visitors arriving via the blog, relatively high bounce rates are common (75%+), but on sites that are more focused on general photography and photographer information (such as my site for Portland event photography), bounce rates will be lower because clients and leads will arrive on the site and explore a bit (before hopefully ending up on my contact page to continue with their inquiry).
Hits, unique visitors, entry page awareness, and bounce rate are a good start for tracking general statistics for your website. In our next installment we’ll talk about referrers, exit pages, and conversion.
Photo by markhillary, used under Creative Commons licensing
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