Website stats

[Vickycgc]

Happy New Year.:)

I have a statistics package for my website and I was wondering if anyone can explain a few things to me. I know what visits per day are but what do hits and files mean?:|

Also any advice on my website would be much appreciated, although visits to the site are increasing I am still disappointed in the number of actual sales.
Any ideas as to why this is are greatly appreciated as for some reason we lose a number of visitors on the cart section.

Many thanks
Vicky

[Coding Monkey]

I'm guessing you're talking about Webalizer, so this page (http://www.fifthgearhosting.com/index.php?id=67) will explain it all for you. But in simple English, a hit is how many time someone visits a page. So, they may only "visit" your website once, but may view 7 pages. So, they account for 7 hits. If 6 of these pages actually exist, they will have downloaded 6 pages. The number of pages is whether it is cached or whether the page actually exists, generally speaking.

[funkydorykid]

Hi!

I've had a little look around your site and added a product to my basket to see what happens next, and see if I can see from a customer POV why they'd change their minds....

These are my initial thoughts.

Your products are lovely, but I don't think your website has much warmth to it. I can see (or suspect) that you've gone for a classy, no fuss feel that lets the products stand out - which is good, but to me it feels a little cold and clinical. It might be worth adding a nice colourful logo to the banner. Also, a coloured background might help - a pale or soft colour - it doesn't have to be too bold, but from listening to female shoppers, they seem to like that kind of look.

Now for the basket. I added one product which was listed at £8.00. It was only when I wanted to check out that I found out there would be VAT on top of that. Retail customers tend to assume VAT is included in the price, so that was a bit of a shock, and also made me wonder what other hidden costs there might be.

Also, there didn't seem to be an option to buy without registering. Some people just like to go through checkout and pay without having to register, so that might be an extra barrier to ordering.

I also wondered what the carriage charges would be - I haven't seen the P & P price very visibly displayed, and didn't read any of the other pages - I'd have been there a long time if I had done that.

I hope this helps - I know how annoying it is when peope fill a basket then disappear - it happens to me too. Very often they come back at a later date, so maybe it's just a case of people being distracted by something else.

dawn
xx

[Chelltune]

I looked at the childrens books, it says the box contains five books but gives no othe rinformation about them. Are they hard back, paper back or board books? What titles are they? I can't see the actual books as they are hidden in the box.

[EBA Advisor]

The website is hard to navigate in my opinion. Dropdown navigation is always a put off for me.

You also need to change the "buy" buttons to "add to basket", or "add to cart"

"Buy" is too much of a comitment for some people, they think if they click on the buy button then there is no going back.

Add to basket etc is less of a comitment and they are more likely to proceed with a purchase as they feel more comfortable with the process.

[Chelltune]

Thanks for that EBA, I will have that changed on mine too.

[bitesoftwarecom]

Hiya there, I'm a new member although I do webdesign as well. I think I echo what a poster above said that your products are very nice but your site isnt really. I'd recommened changing it to make it look warmer. I'm sure you've put a lot of work into it but presentation really does count if you're trying to sell something.

[Kidz Fashion Zone]

I agree that your website layout could be done much better to show off your lovely products

[Vickycgc]

Many thanks everyone for taking the time to view the website and answering my questions. It is really helpful to get an opinion from people that are not relatives or people I know. I am glad the products themselves have had positive feedback, I now know to work on the overall look of the site.

Hi!

Now for the basket. I added one product which was listed at £8.00. It was only when I wanted to check out that I found out there would be VAT on top of that. Retail customers tend to assume VAT is included in the price, so that was a bit of a shock, and also made me wonder what other hidden costs there might be.

dawn
xx

Hi Dawn
Thanks for looking at my site, the products prices do already include vat but for some reason it states that vat will be added later when it isn't. This is now being removed and I feel has put a lot of people off buying.
Thanks once again.
Vicky

[emmajg]

I think you logo should be clickable back to the homepage as well just an idea
other than that and previous comments it a great website and must have taken ages to set up with all those lovely products.
Congrats and good luck
p.s. if you ever need any paper baby booties or paper roses let me know

[spirit_net]

Hello Vicky,

Apart from improving website design you might want to offer LIVE HELP service to users to increase sales. I am sure you must have seen this on many websites especially hosting ones. This can sometimes prove very effective.
There are many free softwares available and one of them is Crafty Syntax Live Help (CSLH)

[Rhinestone]

I have also found that whilst I get plenty of hits and people spend some time browsing I don't get a high % of sales through my site.

To find out why I recently set up a quick (and free) online survey, the results have been really interesting, helpful and re-assuring!

If your going to spend money developing your site, I really think that the only people who can tell why they haven't purchased are those that are browsing because they have an interest in your products.

The survey I used was createsurvey.com, but I'm sure there are others you can use.

[Vickycgc]

I have also found that whilst I get plenty of hits and people spend some time browsing I don't get a high % of sales through my site.

To find out why I recently set up a quick (and free) online survey, the results have been really interesting, helpful and re-assuring!

If your going to spend money developing your site, I really think that the only people who can tell why they haven't purchased are those that are browsing because they have an interest in your products.

The survey I used was createsurvey.com, but I'm sure there are others you can use.

Thanks for that. Have now added survey to my Customer Service page. I have also removed "add vat" at the cart section, added background colour to my homepage, although I keep changing it every half hour!
I have also added a Customer Service page with additional info.
Now I will just have to wait and see if I get any more sales!:rolleyes:
Thanks for all responses.

[Maroculous]

But in simple English, a hit is how many time someone visits a page.

using the method will lead to widely inaccurate stats. For example: each time a visitor views a page you will receive 1 hit. if the page has 4 images on it then you will receive 4 hits (for the images) plus 1 for the page, so a total of 5 hits for one page. This would be for 1 visitor.

There are other factors like caching, proxy servers, scripts etc but that's it in it's simplest form. Coding monkey definition is correct if you only have text on your pages, which you don't.

Another common factor which is overlooked is, if the traffic is from humans or web crawlers (search engines) - which could explain a lot.

[spirit_net]

In my opinion no. of hits and visits don't tell you about lost sales. You have to actually look into the number of pages each user went and the duration they spent. In fact it's a combination of both and many other factors.

For e.g. you may find that in Jan 07 1000 users browsed the following pages in this order:

Home --> About Us --> Products --> Contact Us --> Products --> Search --> Products

Now this may indicate that the users were lost were looking for some kind of information on products page which they couldn't find and so they keep on moving between pages.

At this stage Live Help sofware really help because if you see a user is lost and hasn't clicked on Live Help for some reason, you can still invite him/her to chat with just a click of button.

If your web stats don't provide you this kind of info (page tracking and duration) then download the logs generated by your webserver and use some software like web log expert or 123 log analyzer to generate stats.

[george75]

Can I suggest you use google analytics. It is free, easy to navigate and tells you everything you would ever want to know about your sites performance.