Hit Reports – Concrete Measurements of Website Success

Hit reports, or better, "Visitor Reports," are probably among the least understood and most vital aspects of evaluating Website effectiveness. Here are some basic guidelines for acquiring, deciphering and leveraging visitor reports.

Ask For Them
Strangely enough, Website hosting firms are apathetic when it comes to giving their customers hit reports. Go sign a contract with the local newspaper for $10,000 worth of advertising and your sales rep will be only too eager to provide you with readership demographic information about every newspaper section for every day of the week. Sign up with a firm to host your Website and you may have to go hunting for your visitor report every week or month. If you forget to ask, you may never see one.

Think "Visitors" not "Hits"
Your Website gets "hit" every time a visitor's PC asks the Web server for a file. If your home page has 13 graphics files, then any visitor who sticks around long enough for the whole page to load racks up 14 hits. When the same visitor goes to another page, more hits get racked up. Thus one visitor can rack up dozens or hundreds of hits on one Website during a single visit. So "hits" count less than the number of visitors you get.

Does 129.239.26.10 Mean Anything to You?
Hit reports vary enormously in quality. For example, U S WEST's standard hit reports will dazzle you with such astonishing facts as the fact that your Website got 957 hits from 129.239.26.10. What the heck is that? Well, it's the IP address of a server that's providing a group of people with Internet access. Of course, you'd prefer to be told that the people associated with 129.239.26.10 are, say, from Honeywell, wouldn't you? U S WEST just wants you to look it up yourself, along with maybe another two or three dozen IP addresses that a standard U S WEST hit report will give you. In short, don't settle for just any old hit report. Get one that tells you what you want and need to know.

Use WebTrends, NetTracker or Another Top Visitor Report Software
WebTrends' "Log Analyzer" and NetTracker are two different, top-rated visitor report software packages that will tell you nearly everything you need to know about who is visiting your Website and how long they are staying with you. Both use what Web hosting firms call the raw log data that Web servers acquire every time your Website is visited. Some Web hosting services include WebTrends (www.webtrends.com) or NetTracker (www.nettracker.com) as part of the service. Others expect you to buy the software, go get your raw logo data yourself and produce your own reports. Either way, it's worth you while.

Decide What You Care About
In the end, a quality visitor report will actually tell you more than you need to know, so decide what you most want to know, and study that. For example, if you are depending on banner advertising and/or on reciprocal links with other Websites to generate site traffic, check the part of your visitor report that tells you the "referring site." That's the site the visitor was when he or she clicked on a link or banner and arrived on your site.

Share Your Visitor Reports Across the Company
Some companies routinely share their visitor reports with their sales staff. We know, for example, of a salesperson who was about to give up on a prospect because after six weeks and dozens of unreturned phone calls, he felt the sales effort was useless. Then the visitor report arrived, showing high site activity by the prospect's company. The activity proved that the prospect was interested. The salesperson persisted and got the sale.

Visitor Reports – Better Info than Other Mediums Provide
A high quality visitor report tells you more about your Website's effectiveness than many other mediums can tell you about the marketing dollars you spend there. Buy a billboard and all the billboard company can do is tell you the traffic volume on the street on which the board is located. Of course no one can tell you how many people actually looked up at your billboard. The same is true of the local newspaper. You can learn how many people "read" a given section of the paper, but you can't find out how many actually looked at your ad, much less read it. Your visitor reports, on the other hand, can tell you how many people looked at each Web page, and exactly how many minutes and seconds, on average, people spent looking at it!

Radio stations can tell you how many people listen to their station, and lots of information about those people, but they can't tell you whether 50% of the people who started to hear your commercial switched to another station in the middle of it. A television station can tell you how many people watch Frazier, but they can't tell you how many people muted your commercial on Frazier or how many got up and headed for the kitchen or elsewhere the instant your commercial aired.

In short, Website visitor reports can be powerful and informative measurement tools for your Website, so take the time to get the right kind, study your results and you'll be amply rewarded.

This article first appeared as a column written by Dave Tedlock, NetOutcomes' president, for the Inside Tucson Business and/or the New Mexico Business Weekly.

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