Posted on behalf of Ajay Sethi
Many Microsoft Office Live Small Business users have requested a way to get usage reports for their Web sites that aren’t bloated by their own visits. While adding that feature is under discussion, you can still get a fairly close idea of the number of actual customer visits using the available data in Site Reports.
Before I explain how to do that, consider three ways you as site administrator (or someone working on your site) can get counted as a visitor:
1. By clicking on ‘View Site’ from your home page.
2. By clicking on Website from your home page, and then on the ‘View Site’ link in Page Manager.
3. By clicking ‘View’ when you’re in the Site Designer tool.
All three of those clicks will result in a bloated visitor count.
So how do you figure out the number of customer visits – excluding your own? Follow these steps (which assume I own a domain named graduatetojob.com):
1. Go to Reports -> Visitors or Reports -> Site Usage page and note the total visits for a particular time period (last 12 months/this month/this day/custom) in the ‘Visits’ column.
2. Now go to Reports -> Referring Sources page.
3. Next, we’ll select the time period for view drop down to see the referring sources detail for the time period we’re interested in.
4. Note the visits against my domain (graduatetojob.com), the visits against any of the pages of my domain (graduatetojob-com.sitereports.officelive.com) and any visits against the Office Live Small Business home page (home.officelive.com) for the same period of time that you tracked total visits in Step 1 – in our case, 12 months.
5. Now subtract the total number obtained in Step 4 from the total number of visits that you noted in Step 1.
6. The result should give you the total visits from customers – with your own visits excluded. So in our example, the “non-bloated” visitor count will be 1742 (1846 – (91 + 7 + 6) = 1742).
Note that I said the result should give you the total visits from customers. At present our Referring Sources report shows the top 200 referring sources. So there may be instances where you miss data if your site gets visitors from more than 200 different sources. But I suspect it’s a fairly good count for most of our users.
Ajay Sethi