Net Results
Helping your business succeed online.
Published by nrichmedia (www.nrichmedia.com)
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Volume 4, Issue 5 – October 2008
In This Issue
Welcome
As autumn sweeps in and the rain begins it is the perfect time of year to wrap your hands around a hot cup of tea, sit back and read all about Web statistics and what they mean to you and your business.
Before you do, though, I’d like to introduce the latest member of the nrichmedia team, Arran Kerrigan. Arran will be helping out in many ways in both communications (including this newsletter that you’re reading right now) and administration of the business. She has an MA in English from the University of Aberdeen and has run her own professional organizing business in the Comox Valley for over three years. I’m very pleased and excited to have Arran on board!
Featured Article: Web Statistics Demystified
It is imperative to understand what sort of experience visitors have with your web site and specifically, how people are moving around and utilizing your site. This is essential for sites that want to attract and keep advertisers but it is also very important for product and service sites without ads. By knowing how customers get to your site, where your customers ‘travel’ through your site, how long they spend on specific pages and where they ‘exit’ you can optimize your site for the best results. By using web statistic reports you can see if changes you make to your site result in more visits and/or sales and, if your site does have ads, the advertisers can predict the revenue they will receive based on these statistics.
To help you understand this journey we have defined some of the key web statistics terms.
ON-SITE WEB ANALYTICS is the study of the online behaviour of visitors to your web site in order to improve its results. Web stat reports from companies, such as Webalizer, let you measure the performance of your web site in a commercial context. There are several different web statistic programs available – most hosting companies include one in their packages.
PAGE VIEWS - Each time a web page on a site is accessed by a visitor, it counts as one page view, whether or not the same user viewed the same page 10 seconds ago.
HIT or PAGE HIT is the retrieval of any items related to a web page from the web server. A single web page can have several items, images, cascading style sheets, scripts etc., that all count as hits. For example, when a visitor calls up a web page with six images that counts as at least seven hits; one for each of the images and one for the page itself (plus possibly more if there are style sheets or scripts in the programming). There is a common misconception that a ‘hit” and a page view or even a site visit are the same thing, but clearly they’re not. When someone brags about getting a certain number of hits on his/her site, that number is really quite meaningless. The actual number of visitors to the site might be a small fraction of the hits. Page views and visits are a far better indicator of web traffic than page hits.
VISITS - A visit is an individual session spent on a web site consisting of one or more requests for a web stat definable unit of content (i.e., “page view”). If an individual has not taken another action (typically additional page views) on the site within a specified time period, the defined visit will terminate.
UNIQUE VISITORS - The number of individuals (filtered for spiders and robots) who visit a web site within a designated timeframe. Each individual is counted only once in the unique visitor measure for the reporting period. This ‘count’ can be done in two ways: either by requesting visitors to log in or by placing cookies on each visitor’s computer.
ENTRY PAGE - The first page a visitor comes to on your web site. This can be different for each viewer depending on how they found your site. It is often, but not always, the home page.
EXIT PAGE - The last page a visitor views before leaving your site.
VISIT DURATION - The length of time visitors spend on individual pages within a web site and the duration of their entire visit to a site.
REFERRING URLS or REFERRERS - As users click on links in a web site, the browser moves to the specified link and simultaneously sends along the URL of the previous page. This "sent along" URL is called a referring URL. This is quite handy in being able to see how people found your site and if external links are bringing in traffic.
SEARCH STRINGS are key words or phrases entered by users into a search engine, such as Google, in order to retrieve the information they need.
There are many more web site metrics than those we’ve mentioned here, but these are some of the more common terms. Hopefully this sheds some light on the basics and will help you to understand how your site is performing relative to expectations on a day-to-day or month-to-month basis and how you can use that information to continually improve your web site’s results.
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Want more valuable information like this to help your socially responsible
business become an online success and get the results you've been looking
for? Subscribe to Net Results, our FREE
quarterly newsletter by filling in the form at the top left of this
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About nrichmedia
nrichmedia creates innovative and unique web sites and other multimedia
for ethical and socially responsible businesses and organizations.
We also offer green web hosting, web site maintenance, CD-ROM production,
and more.
nrichmedia was founded by Nathaniel Richman in 2000. Nathaniel graduated
from the Vancouver Film School with a Certificate of Recommendation
in Multimedia Studies in 1997 and has been working in the web design
and new media industry ever since. He previously received a Bachelor
of Mathematics degree (Honours Actuarial Science) from the University
of Waterloo and worked in the pension consulting industry.
Nathaniel works with other designers and programmers, according to the
needs of the project, to provide the client with the most professionally
designed web site and other marketing material as possible.
"I constantly receive incredible feedback on my site - it truly is something I'm proud of and love to have as a communication tool for my business. Many new clients find me via Google searches now! I am consistently booked 3 weeks in advance, and am drawing in the niche of clients that I love to work with. Awesome work Nathaniel!"
- Sonja Rawlings, Registered Massage Therapist, Vernon, BC, Cascade Massage Therapy
To learn more about nrichmedia’s services, view
our online portfolio, and read glowing
testimonials from many satisfied clients, please visit www.nrichmedia.com.
Green Web Hosting
nrichmedia is pleased to be offering green web hosting services. Our
standard package includes 500MB of disk space (which is usually way
more than most small to medium sized businesses require), email and
webmail accounts, and web statistics which allow you to track how many
visitors there are to your site, where they come from, what search
terms they used to find your site, etc.
What makes our web hosting green? A few things, really:
- Our hosting is shared on powerful, energy
efficient servers so the amount of electricity we use is minimized. We maintain our
own dedicated environment within these servers so that we have full
control over performance and security.
- The electricity used by the servers comes from hydropower, which,
although not ideal, is one of the more environmentally
friendly means
of power generation.
- We’ve purchased wind power certificates to offset the
amount of electricity that we do use. Wind power is, of course, a natural, clean, and abundant energy source with
little or no negative impact on the environment.
If you would like to switch to nrichmedia’s green web hosting,
please click here for details.
Charitable Causes
nrichmedia donates 5% of proceeds on all projects of $500 and above
to charitable organizations. We are pleased to have supported and continue
to support several worthy causes. To see a list of the organizations
we support, please visit www.nrichmedia.com/causes.htm.
The Not-to-be Missed Link: Etheco’s Ethical Business Directory
Etheco’s Business Directory is an easy to navigate database of environmentally and socially conscious businesses. You simply enter the product or service that you're looking for into the search box or choose from one of the categories they have listed.
This is the site to visit before you shop for ethical/ eco products and services. See: www.etheco.com/ethical_directory/index.html
Archives
To view previous editions of Net Results, visit www.nrichmedia.com/archives.htm.
Pass it on and Enjoy
Please feel free to pass this newsletter on to anyone who might find
it useful.
Want more valuable information like this to help your socially responsible
business become an online success and get the results you've been looking
for? Subscribe to Net Results, our FREE
quarterly newsletter by filling in the form at the top left of this
page.
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PDF Version
 nrichmedia
is located in Courtenay (in the Comox Valley, on Vancouver Island),
British Columbia, Canada, and thinks and works globally! Thanks
to the Internet, we're able to create web sites and other multimedia
for clients all over the world. You can contact us by
or by telephone, at 250.871.7424.
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