Unique Visitors to Pages View ratio?

Unique Visitors compared to Pages View

[Sauna]

I am just asking a general question in attempt to understand my data.

I am using some web tracking software and my question is regarding that Unique Visitor to my site as compared to Pages View. The ratio is high – should it be? Is there a standard ratio that I a attempting to receive?

Let me provide an example – the other day I had 123 unique visitors and on that same day I had 828 pages viewed. Of course, the ultimate goal is to have these visitors convert over to sales (Note, on my site we want the visitor to call us) – what should my focus be?

[ronburk]

The ratio is high – should it be?

How could we know? Maybe the ratio is high because lots of visitors are following a path you designed to draw them down into ever more specialized information categories. In that case, that high ratio is just fantastic news.

Or maybe the ratio is high because, like many others, your website makes people fish all over kingdom come trying to find the price for things, until they give up and go elsewhere. In that case, that high ratio is just awful news.

Might as well focus on whether you're getting more even than odd IP addresses -- this is not a useful number to study in abstract isolation.

[Sauna]

Sorry for my description being evasive…

However, since I have a big ticket item(s) were my customers do not simply “add it to a shopping cart”. I am trying to determine the pattern of my visitor. Which it will be complicated by the fact that some users may want to compile a list of research data and others will simply want to know the price.

The ratio between page views and unique visitors is just one area that I have not given a lot of attention…I am just finding it difficult to determine a useful pattern…

[sebs]

Sauna, we also faced the same problem recently. We got a page view / visitor of 15 and we "knew" it was not correct. We looked around and found that spiders were causing the problem. If you look at the behavior of spiders, they tend to crawl a lot of pages in one go and it could skew your average view / visitor data. I'm not sure what software you are using to track. I suggest filtering out crawler data and then calculate the page view / visitor again.

[sebs]

On measuring how many people call you... How about dedicating one number only for calls originating from the website? Make sure that this number is not given to the outside world. And then let the operator count the calls.

We had tried one more trick once. We gave the phone numbers only on a popup that user had to explicitly launch. Looking at the number of visitors on the pop up gave us an idea about the number of people calling.

[Sauna]

Thank you,

You bring up an interesting point that I had not considered – crawlers. I am using HitsLink software – straight from their website for tracking our web activity. Its basic but that works for our sales team. However, I do not know if it has any filters for weeding out crawlers?

I don’t image crawlers have a particular time that they work? I am asking because we will notice “spikes” during usual times of the day – sometimes late in the evening (after midnight). This seems odd for us because of the demographics of our perspective customers.

[sebs]

I haven't really looked at the timings of crawlers. But when they deep crawl, they are capable of creating spikes. There are other instances of spikes as well - using softwares that check broken links, someone using a software to download your full website, etc.