Single page accesses - mainly spiders ?

Is this the norm, what's the percentage ?

[fom2001uk]

Looking at a WebTrends report, I see 60% of visits as single page accesses. I'm thinking this is inflated by spider visits.

Is this normal for spiders and what percentage of single page accesses are they responsible for ?

I could filter out spider visits and re-run the report, but I'm not sure how to do it.

Help anyone ?

[Hannu]

First of all you need to find the user agent names (or IP addresses) of the most common spiders, check here:

[searchengineworld.com...]

Then you make a new profile where you make an exclude "User agent" filter with the above.

WebTrends has some spiders predefined but if you're not running one of the newest versions, I recommend you find the spiders on the above list.

[Mardi_Gras]

Your single page accesses can be significantly exaggerated by AOL visitors. A single AOL visitor can be assigned several different IP addresses over the course of a visit, each time looking like a new visitor in your logs.

Also, if you correlate visits to search terms, you may find that some of your single page accesses are people who searched for something else and found you. They hit the back button and move on.

And, as you suggested, some of those visits are spiders. But you should be able to spot those in Webtrends, as Hannu said.

You may find that on closer examination, many of those who came to your site and found what they were expecting actually view quite a few more pages than you think at first glance. So don't let the 60% number scare you until you're satisfied that it is a truly representative number.

[mark_roach]

>>Also, if you correlate visits to search terms, you may find that some of your single page accesses are people who searched for something else and found you. They hit the back button and move on.

It could also be made up of people who found exactly what they were looking for and left. When I am searching for the answer to a question I regularly only hit one page in a site. I find it much easier to look at a number of single pages from different sites, rather than spend time looking for the answer on one site. (I actually tend to use the google cache so most people won't even know I have been there).

There is no substitute for putting yourself in the surfer shoes. Get your raw logs (or a product that lets you see visitor paths), choose a few searches at random and copy your visitors movements.

Ask yourself these questions:

Did they find what what you think they were looking for ?
And if not, how can you improve your site's navigation and/or content in order to help the next surfer using the same query ?