StatCounter Blog

Today we launch a new feature on StatCounter – Paid Traffic. If you use paid advertising services such as Google Adwords or Bing Ads to promote your website, this new stat will give you an overview of the traffic you are receiving from your advertising spend.

Paid clicks (i.e. clicks to your site from pay-per-click advertising) are grouped together by IP address. The IP address which has generated the largest number of paid clicks to your site is placed at the top.

Let’s take a closer look at the available information using the above example.

• Icons: On the left hand side you will see icons representing the browser, operating system and country of the visitor. In this case, the paid clicks were from a US visitor using the Safari browser and iOS operating system.
• Paid Clicks and Page Views: In this case there are the same number (108) of paid clicks and page views from the IP Address. This means that each time the visitor clicked an advert for your site, they arrived at your site but then did not explore any further pages. This could be an indication of a poor landing page i.e. the initial page your visitor saw did not attract them to visit any further pages of your site.
• Visit Time: For visitors who have explored further than the initial landing page, this column will show the average visit time over all of their paid visits to your site.

Detailed View

Clicking on the plus icon: gives you a detailed breakdown of each click:

This shows that all 5 clicks came from Google, and all 5 were for the exact same search; ‘lock smith’. Note that 4 of the paid clicks resulted in only 1 page view each. This may indicate that the user visited your site but then decided to ‘bounce’ and immediately leave your site (rather then exploring more pages) and click on some other Google results instead.

From here, you can continue to drill down on the IP Address by clicking on the magnifier icon: where you can get a more detailed view on the exact timestamps of each hit as well as the other pages the visitor navigated to on your site.

Click Fraud

StatCounter is often used to identify instances of Click Fraud. We hope that the new Paid Traffic stat will make click fraud detection even easier for our members. For example, high numbers of paid clicks from a single IP address could indicate click fraud, especially if the visitor only ever visits the initial landing page of your site.

NOTE: Click Fraud occurs when individuals or automated computers click on a PPC ad without having any interest in the product/service advertised. Click Fraud is performed, instead, simply to generate a cost for the advertiser (without any chance of making a sale) and consume the advertiser’s budget.

Conclusion

We hope that this new stat gives our members a quick and easy way to review the return they are getting for their spend on Google Adwords and Bing Ads.

Please let us know your thoughts on this new feature. How are you using this stat? Can we improve it? What other ad networks would you like us to include? Any other questions or comments? Please post below.

We’re excited to launch a new feature today; ‘Incoming Traffic’!

Learn about your Traffic Sources

Our new ‘Incoming Traffic’ stat combines information from our Keyword and Came From stats with information on Direct Traffic to your site to give you new insights into how your website is generating traffic.

Direct Traffic: This is where a visitor types your website URL directly into the address bar of their browser, or they use a browser bookmark to access your website.

Referring Websites: A referring website is simply a website which refers (or sends) traffic to your site via a link. Where referring websites (which are not recognised Search Engines/Social Media sites – see below) have links to your website, any traffic generated via those links will be indicated here e.g. a link from a blog post or forum.

Social Networks: A referring website that we’ve identified as a social network e.g. Facebook or Twitter.  Most social networks don’t provide full referral information on the specific page that brought visitors to your site e.g. facebook just gives the referrer info as http://facebook.com/ or http://m.facebook.com/. Information on the specific facebook page which referred traffic to your site is not available.

Paid Search Traffic: This is traffic from paid advertising e.g. AdWords or BingAds. (Are you paying for advertising on another ad network? If so, please let us know so that we can add this network to our paid search traffic stats.)

Organic Search Traffic (or Search Engine Referrals): This is traffic which results from a user performing a search using Google/Bing/Yahoo etc. and clicking on one of the general (or organic) search results rather than one of the sponsored/paid results.  If you don’t have any paid search traffic, then this item is simply labelled ‘Search Engine Referrals’.

Direct Domain Searches: These are searches where your visitors type your domain (e.g. statcounter.com) OR keywords which match your domain (e.g. Stat Counter) directly into a Search Engine. We’ve listed these separately as these queries indicate that the user is already aware of your site and is locating your site via a search engine for convenience rather than typing the URL directly into a browser address bar.

Detailed Information

On the right hand side of the legend entries, you can expand some of the items to get a detailed view of the top entries for that category:

This feature can give you a quick overview of the top referring websites. For further details, you can open the ‘Came From’ stats page using the link provided.

Learn about New Referring Websites (note: not always visible)

“New Referring Websites” alerts you to new links to your website from around the web. It works by looking for new ‘Came From’ links (which are not already in your log file of stats) which are generating relatively high levels of incoming traffic. This can be a good way to discover external sites which have just added a link to your website. For example, if your website is mentioned in a forum post and is receiving traffic from the forum, then “New Referring Websites” will highlight this to you allowing you to respond to the forum thread if you wish.

Other News: Improved Navigation

As we launch our new Incoming Traffic stat, we’ve also taken the opportunity to begin improving the left navigation options on StatCounter. To start, we have grouped “Entry Pages” and “Exit Pages” under “Popular Pages”.  You can click the + symbol beside “Popular Pages” to access the sub-menu of stats available.

You can also choose to hide the sub-menu under “Incoming Traffic”: hover the cursor over the “Incoming Traffic” entry in the left navigation bar and click the minus icon which appears:

As always, we welcome your questions, comments and feedback below.

Have you ever wondered…

1. What search terms are Canadian visitors using to find my site?
2. Which US states do I get most traffic from?
3. Which pages on my site are most popular with visitors from London, England?

Our new “Filter” feature makes it easier for you to answer these questions and many others too. Let’s look at an example…

Keyword Analysis – Filter

Click “filter” on the Keyword Analysis page to access the available filters for this statistic.

The available filters will be displayed like this:

——————————–Use the “search term” filter to isolate keywords (or groups of keywords). In the example below, a bakery website uses this filter to examine those keywords in their stats which include the term “cake”.

——————————–Use the “entry page” filter to identify which keywords result in hits to specific entry pages (aka “landing pages”) of your site. In the example below, we examine which keywords result in hits to the Spanish language landing page on the bakery website.

——————————–It’s also possible to combine filters. For example, our bakery can examine all keywords containing the term “cake” which result in hits to the Spanish language page on their site. They simply apply both the “search term” and “entry page” filters to their stats like this:

——————————–Use the “pageviews per visit” filter to exclude bounce visits (visits with only a single hit). This helps you to identify keywords which result in visitors viewing two or more pages of your site.

Bounce visits occur when a visitor enters your site then “bounces” away again having only viewed one page on your site. (Although often considered a negative, bounce visits may not necessarily be a bad thing… but that’s a blog post for another day )

——————————–Use the “labelled visitors” filter to isolate the keywords used by the visitors you have labelled within your StatCounter project (Note: the “labelled visitors” filter is hidden if you haven’t yet labelled any visitors in your project).

——————————–Use the “country” filter to review the keywords used to find your site by visitors from a specific country.

——————————–

Filters are available on all of the most popular stats pages on StatCounter, and some stats pages have extra filters relevant to the stat in question.  We’ll be continuing to expand the range of filters available as well as the stats pages that are covered by filters.

Feedback Please!

We would be really grateful if you could take some time to have a look at the new filter options. Let us know what you think. Any questions on what the filters mean? Any confusion on interpreting the stats? Is there another filter that you would find useful? What other options would you like to have available?

Your feedback is vital and will be used to refine and improve this new feature. Thank you folks.

NOTES:
- The example bakery site and related stats used in this blog post are entirely fictional.
- The filter feature is under ongoing development – expect changes and additions.
- Question 1 above can be answered by going to “Keyword Analysis”, filter by “Country” and select “Canada”
- Question 2 above can be answered by going to “Country/State/City/ISP”, choose the “State/Region” option, filter by “Country” and select “United States”
- Question 3 above can be answered by going to “Popular Pages”, filter by “Town/City” and select “London, United Kingdom”

On Christmas Day, we wish you all the very best for the holidays.

As usual, we don’t send Christmas cards. Instead we make a donation to charity. This year we’re supporting 4 Kids 2 Live.

Thanks to each and every one of our members for your support throughout 2012. We look forward to working with you in the New Year and we wish you health, happiness, peace and prosperity in 2013.