Forum Moderators: DixonJones
My web site just popped up in the Google index in October. I designed the site to have lots of content in hopes of getting people to bookmark the site and to "hang around" a while. Using the Urchin Stats program provided by my web host, I'm able to get at least an idea of what my visitors are up to. Problem is, I have no idea if this is good, bad or ugly. Was hoping some experienced web masters could shed some light on this.
Using my logs (looking for "favicon") I've determined that on any given day between 3%-7% of all unique visitors to the site bookmark it (at least in browsers that are capable of doing it). To take advantage of this, I even developed a cute little bookmark icon, which also worked wonders in getting rid of the 404 errors I was seeing.
Anway, is this percentage of unique visitors who bookmark my site a good one?
Secondly, my site gets around only 200-300 unique visitors on a good day, although it is growing. Using the Urchin Stats program, I'm able to track quite well how many pages each visitor who is referred to my site visits.
For Google/Yahoo search visitors, they stay between 6-8 pages each. Very, very few people stay for only one page - less than 5% of all visitors stay for only 1 page, I would say. The majority seem to stay in the 4-6 page range, with a bunch more staying in the 30+ page range (my site is 1000+ pages). Is this depth of visit a good one?
For MSN referrels, I have a much higher depth of visit - averaging around 13 or more pages. Reason for this is probably because Inktomi refuses to spider my site so I don't get any general searches. Instead, I get what little traffic I get from my Zeal listing, which leads to very, very targeted searches.
Most other referrels (from link exchanges and things) average out around 10 pages or so. Is this a good number?
Anyway, any feedback on this would be great. I'm basically trying to determine if my site is "working properly" in capturing new visitors and keeping them there.
Also, while I can determine the length of visit, the numbers in my Urchin program are horribly skewed by spiders and AOL (every hit by an AOL visitor is counted as a unique visit - thus I manually filter out all AOL stats). Since I can't filter anything in Urchin, the length of visit in terms of time can't really be used properly right now.
Thanks.
Jim
That being said, I'd say your bookmark rate looks pretty good, and a figure of less than 5% single-page visits is pretty impressive - most of your visitors are obviously happy enough with what they've found that they want to explore further :)
