How popular is your website? Check your stats

Here are two questions every organisation should be able to answer: how many visits were there to your website last month and which pages were the most looked at? Do you know? Your statistics are a useful tool in helping you prove the worth of your website – and by extension your organisation - to your trustees and funders.

Your website’s hosting company should provide website statistics and these are key to measuring the popularity of your site. You probably already have web stats – take another look at the emails your host sent you when you bought hosting, look on their website or call them to find out. Typically you access these statistics via a control panel on your own website or your host’s website using a password. Check your stats monthly to track how many people visit, what they look at and what they don’t, and look at the list of referring websites to find out if they followed a link on another website to find yours.

If your hosting company doesn’t provide a stats tool, or if what they provide just isn’t good enough, you could sign up for the free Google Analytics service. This is an excellent tool, simple to set up and get the hang of, very visual with plenty of graphs and graphics, yet clever enough to produce reports for the most complex of websites. All you have to do is get a Google account and insert a line of code at the bottom of your web pages. Then you can log into Google at any time to see your latest statistics.

Statistics are not necessarily simple or obvious enough to understand without some knowledge of what they represent. You may have heard website owners boasting about the huge number of ‘hits’ their sites get: however, this figure by itself is almost entirely meaningless. Instead, start by looking at how many visitor sessions you get per month: a visitor session means that a person went to your website, looked at one or more pages, then left again. Is this figure increasing or decreasing? Does that trend relate to how often you’ve updated your content?

Then look at how many page views you receive per month. Divide this figure by the number of visitors to find out how many pages the average person looks at. If few people are visiting you need to do more to promote your site; if many people visit your site but don’t read much when they get there, maybe that indicates you need to write more interesting content. Trends are important: month-by-month your page views should be increasing.

Your stats tool should tell you which pages are the most viewed. For example on www.ectopic.org.uk one of the most popular pages is about symptoms: not surprising when an ectopic pregnancy is an oft-misdiagnosed condition. What about the least popular pages? Is there are reason no-one reads the page about the history of your charity – is it just too dull? Sorry, it probably is! Or do you need to make the link to it more prominent on your home page? Perhaps the really good content on your site is hidden where no-one sees it.

You should be able to find out which other websites have ‘referred’ visitors to your site. This is very useful information because you may find out that most of your visitors have found you by clicking on links on just a few other websites; on the other hand you may have very few referrals at all: either way it’s time to start asking more sites to create links to yours.

Once you’ve got to grips with web statistics, include them in your reports to funders, discuss them in staff meetings, let your colleagues know what’s hot and what’s not and encourage them to contribute. But keep it very short: there’s nothing more dull than a half-hour PowerPoint presentation on statistics!