If the answer is ‘every single page’ then it’s time for a reality check.

There are going to be visitors who enter your website from lots of different sources arriving at many different pages with uniquely different needs and varying amounts of available time. Some of them will know your site as well as you do and others will know nothing and need time to investigate it. All of these variables will influence how many pages your visitors will see.

No matter who you are, a .Gov or .Mil or even a .Com, you can write-off a bunch of pages. Everyone knows that no one visits Terms of Use pages or Disclaimer pages, and very rarely do visitors check out Privacy pages. These are the ‘fine print’ and are legal requirements. Visitors know it and they don’t even look at them.

I’m an analyst for one site that gets over 1,000,000 pageviews per month. Here’s the general stats report:

Here’s the report showing the total number of Pageviews for the Terms of Use page:

Check out how many times the Privacy page was viewed:

In some circles, these would be considered some of the most important pages on a site. Not in visitor circles.

So what is it visitors do care about on your site? What metrics will tell you what visitors do care about?

You might be sitting there, staring off into space, wondering…

1) Is my content/product interesting
2) How can I make the stuff I want them to see more interesting to visitors?
3) If not the content I want them to see, what content/product are visitors seeking when they come to my site?

These are good questions.

I wish I could hand you a little box all wrapped up with the answer inside. Fact is, this is your ‘secret sauce’ and it’s unique to every website.

Web metrics are not unique to every site and there are reports buried within your web statistics program that can put you on the right path to figuring out why visitors came to your site and what they might want. Check out the report below. The report shows the most common Landing Pages segmented by greatest Page Depth, or the number of pages

The center column of this report shows the page visitors landed on when they came to the site.

Clue 1: Landing Page: Visitors arrived at this page, most likely, after having performed a search that matched keywords used on this page. (Note: With the exception of Item 7, the URLs of this pages are optimized to include the most commonly used keywords for their content matter.)

The right column of this report shows the number of times this page was viewed out of the total 1,000,000+ pageviews on the site relative to the left column, the Page Depth, which shows the most pages visited once a visitor arrived on the site.

Clue 2: Pageviews: Higher numbers of pageviews normally indicate the pages visitors sought and found most on search engines and the pages of the site visitors found most desirable to visit.

Clue 3: Page Depth: It can be inferred that a customer who views multiple pages ‘deep’ into the site during their visit is in serious pursuit of some specific content. The page URL gives you some indication of what that content may be.

Here’s the report:

Getting valuable insights from your web metrics is difficult because it’s tough to know what questions need to be asked, and it’s hard to know how to structure the analytics reports to present actionable data.

If you need a web analyst, leave a comment below.