As a web provider Aging Safely tracks its web statistics carefully several ways. One of the best ways is to to use Google Analytics. It doesn't count visits from the accounts that we use for development and management of the site, so these are real hits from interested people.Google Analytics counts only real users that are operating web browsers, since it uses JavaScript.

There are typically three ways that web sites gather web statistics:

1. Web Server (IIS or Apache) logs. Web Servers log HTTP requests which are often called hits. At Aging Safely's site the average web page has 20 HTTP requests, or hits. If someone is reporting very high numbers for their web site it is often because this is the values they are reporting.
2. Application Page Views. There are many Content Management Systems that log Page Views. We use DotNetNuke as our CMS system. These systems don't track the difference from page views from Real People or Spiders and other automated systems that access every page on the web site indexing the site for Google, Yahoo and hundreds or thousands of other search engines. An analysis at Aging Safely indicates that 50% of our Page Views are from these robots.
3. Google Analytics or other JavaScript based tools that only work with real web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.) operated by live people actually looking at the pages.  These are the statistics that we pay attention to and report on.  

When I realized that the search engine spiders weren't counted by Google Analytics I was even more impressed with the average of number page views per visitor and average time on site. See the Google Analytics Glossary for more information on the terms below.

• A Visit is staying on the site for a period that doesn't include a break of more than 30 minutes between page views.
• New Visits are visitors that have not been to the site before as determined by a cookie.
• Unique Visitors are determined by a cookie and represent unique accounts on a computer.
• Average Pagesviews is the number of pages looked during a visit.
• Time on Site is the time between the first page an last page viewed without leaving the site for at least 30 minutes. Time on the last page (or only page) in not included in this time since Google can't tell when they left!
• Bounce Rate is the percent of visits that resulted in only a single page during a visit.
• % Search is the percentage of visits referred by a search engine. They may have searched for "Aging Safely" or they might have searched for "Adult Family Home Some City" or anything else that got them to Aging Safely.
• % Google, %Yahoo, %MS are percent of visits that were referred from search engines. MS is the combination of MSN and Live search engines.
• LH.pv is the number of page views for the Listed Homes page. Each of the page views was a potential search that could have matched a client with a vacancy at your Adult Family Home. Note: Because of the search technology we use all of the searchs that are done by a user at one time without closing the page are recorded as a single page view.
• DS.pv is the number if page views of the Datasheet for any Adult Family Home. This represents the number AFHs being investigated by potiental clients. These potiental clients had to be interested enough to want more data than was displayed on the Listed Homes page!
• ~ASI.Visits is percentage of the total vists that went to the AFH web sites that we host.

 Comparing to Similar Sites

In May of this year Google Analytics added a Beta report to compare our site with the average of similar sites. They call this benchmarking.  Aging Safely is compared with sites in the Assisted Living & Long Term Care business of similar size.  There are six catagories:

1. Visits --- Aging Safely was 474% of the average number of vists per month.
2. Bounce Rate --- Aging Safely was 10% below of the average -- Low is good on this metric.
3. Page Views --- Aging Safely was 626% of the average.
4. Time on Site --- 4 min 33 sec. The average was 1 min 19 sec.
5. Pages per Visit --- 3.57 or 27% more than the average.
6. New Visits --- 71% or 5% more than average

On a periodic basis we will monitor this report, but as of today we are very happy how we compare.

Location Data

The location data is not as presise as we would like. Try this web page to see where you are located. The city that you show up in depends on how your Internet Service Provider connects to the internet. For Example:

• Aging Safely show up in Bothell because that is were Verizon's centeral office for our service is located even though we are located in Woodinville.
• People using the King County Library System usually show up from Issaquah, since that is where KCLS's headquarters is located and where they connect to the public internet.
• Comcast Cable, a very popular ISP, connects to the public internet in fewer places than Verizon and Quest so that were get less specific location information from them.

Visits - Page Views etc.