Website Stats – Basics You Should Know

By Bob Schwartz, CRS, GRI ©2003 Promotions Unlimited  All rights reserved.

This material is subject to copyright and any unauthorized use, copying or mirroring is prohibited.  

Many attorneys take a great amount of time seeing that their websites are created the way they envision.  When it comes to learning how to access the traffic stats and the correct interpretation of them, many don’t.  Other do not even realize that their site had such a feature.

When considering hosting for your site, an often, overlooked question should be what type of web statistics are provided in the hosting package?  Many low cost hosting packages have very basic traffic statistics data.  Others may provide only access to the raw traffic file, which you can download and run through your own analyzation software.

The best solution for the vast majority of law firms is to inquire if the potential hosting provider includes Webalizer.  Webalizer is a more complex stats program, which produces a nice variety of charts and graphs about who visited your site.  This is probably the most popular stats engine available today. The charts below are all produced directly from Webalizer,

Below is some basic information most attorneys will find useful:

#1. Monthly traffic.

Here the most important data is the “Visits” column.  Many believe the “Hits” data to be important.  This is a false assumption.  Various files and graphics load when a page is opened.  Hits are showing the total of all these files.  So, to keep it simple, if your page has 17 graphics, one visitor may show up as 17 hits.

It is far more productive to just look at the “Visits” column.  These are the unique visitors.  Most web stat programs will record one unique visitor per IP address in a 24-hour period.

Planning a print or broadcast campaign mentioning your website?  If so, looking at your unique visitors here, and in your daily figures, will show you if your campaign has resulted in increased traffic to your site.   Also the monthly and daily traffic can be used as a cross check for any pay-for-placement search engine campaigns.

Keep in mind, it’s not so much the increased traffic you are looking for, but the actual conversion you achieve from traffic to paying client, that is vital. You may see a lot of traffic from purchasing generic legal key-word phrases like “criminal defense lawyer” or “divorce lawyer.”  Because these phrases are too general, you will find your actual conversion ratio will actually plummet.

Yes, it’s not just traffic that is important, but quality, focused traffic, you should be striving to achieve.

#2. Daily Stats:

A great way to track daily results from your ad campaigns allows you to try one version of a campaigns one week and compare your traffic to a revised copy in the same media or other media the following week.

#3 HOURLY STATS