In the last couple of months, we started discussing website stats. I described what web stats actually are and showed you how you can see your stats on the CommercialVoices.com site.

This month I'll go over those numbers in even greater detail. Recall that you can bring up the page for your CommercialVoices.com stats by using the URL - "http://commercialvoices.com/platinum/MYPAGE/stats.php" - where you replace MYPAGE with your CommercialVoices.com username

In our example last month we could drill-down into the stats to get to specific details:

Platinum Stats for Member X

and:

Platinum Stats for Member X

So what do these bits of info REALLY tell us? A lot, actually....

For one thing - you can see what pages of your site are getting the most attention. In the above example, Member X's contact and bio pages get the majority of the hits, but less people go to the demo page. Now Member X has to be careful how to interpret this. It could mean that people are reading the info on the contact/bio pages, and not sufficiently interested to check out the demo... OR it can simply mean that people were being curious and not really looking for voice talent, and so, didn't bother to check the demos.

As you can see, stats are very open to interpretation.... you'd have to pay attention to your stats over time, and correlate them to your actual client list to determine if there's a possible reason you don't get page hits where you expect.

Now the really detailed info with the date time and IP can also be very revealing. Given the IP number, you can get a rough idea of where the viewer was browsing from. (Just plug the IP into the IP info tools at http://samspade.com and you'll get a whole host of details). Now that doesn't give you a specific address for the user, just the regional info for their ISP, so while broad, it can be interesting if you find that you get a lot of pages hits from users in the UK or Germany, instead of North America.

And the CommercialVoices.com web designers have been working hard to give you new stat information as well. The new features include providing the unique visitor count in the page hit numbers. This helps you differentiate between the same user browser throughout your pages vs. the number of truly new user and unique page visits. As well, there are new graph stats that show counts for the number of listens that occurred on each of your demo clips. This can help you keep track of clips that get the most response vs. the ones that don't. If the same clips continually show poor click rates over time, that may indicate that the clip lacks a certain appeal (or not! As I mentioned, reading stats is a very interpretative process, and can be analyzed several ways!)

There is a lot of info provided by the stats that can be analyzed to help you in your marketing/promotion plans... it's well worth to keep tabs on your stats over time and look for patterns/trends. These point to potential positives/negatives that you can focus on and adapt to. You always want to make sure your pages have the broadest appeal to your intended market, and the stats can help you in maintaining that!

See ya next month!
Cheers,
Bruce