See Who Is Visiting Your Actor Website and What They Read
The statistics screen has been rebuilt around three questions: how many people came, what did they look at, and how did they find you. Everything that did not answer one of those has been removed from your free actor website dashboard.
What you see
- Visitors over time. A line, by day or by month, with a comparison to the previous period.
- Pages, ranked. Which of your pages people actually opened.
- Sources. Search, social, direct, and referrals from other sites.
- Devices. Phone against desktop, which usually surprises people.
Numbers are now rolled up daily rather than stored one row per visit, which is why the screen loads instantly even on a site with years of history behind it.
How to read them without driving yourself mad
Actor website traffic is small and spiky. That is normal and it is not a problem. You will have weeks with eleven visitors and a day with four hundred because a show got reviewed. Judging yourself on the daily number is a route to misery and to bad decisions.
Look at three things instead:
- The shape over months, not days. Is the floor rising?
- Which page ranks second. The home page always wins. The runner-up tells you what people actually came for, and that page deserves your attention.
- Spikes, and their cause. A spike after you sent a mailout means your list works. A spike from a search engine means a page is starting to rank.
The most useful number on the page
The proportion of visitors on a phone. For most actors it sits between 55 and 75 percent. If your site has never been checked on a phone and three quarters of your visitors are on one, that is the most important thing this screen will ever tell you. Our guide to mobile optimization covers what to do about it.
What statistics will not tell you
Who they were. Casting directors do not identify themselves, and anyone selling you a tool that claims to name your visitors is selling you a guess. What you can do is make it easy for an interested visitor to become a known one: a working contact page, a newsletter signup, and a reason to use either.
If you want more depth
Connecting your own analytics account is on the roadmap and will land as analytics: Google and Clicky. The built-in screen will stay deliberately simpler. For the wider argument about why any of this matters, we wrote understanding your audience through your actor website.
No numbers to look at yet? Create your free actor website and start collecting them.
