Today we are very excited to launch a new feature: Stats.

Our stats package shows you how many people are visiting your site, who they are, where they’re coming from, and what pages they’re looking at. This lets you measure the effectiveness of your web site and see how SandwichBoard is helping to introduce customers to your restaurant.

Let’s take a look (you can click on any of the images for a larger version):

Across the top is a graph showing how many visits you had for each of the last 30 days. This gives a good measure of how many people are viewing your site each day. Immediately below the graph is a summary of how many visits, unique visitors and page views you’ve had in the last 30 days.

Next there are a few statistics telling you about your visitors. How many are new visitors, how many leave after one page, and how many use certain browsers and operating systems.

The little graph next to each statistic is called a sparkline and shows the daily totals for each of the statistics. Sparklines are a great way to get an idea of the daily variation and general trends of each of the statistics.

Next we have a series of tables showing where your visitors come from. The first table shows how many visitors found you via a search engine, how many followed a link from another site, and how many came directly to your site. Then there is a table that shows the sites that have linked to your site. To the right is a table showing what keywords people have searched for to find your site.

You can click on the title of any column in any table to sort the table.

Finally we have a table that shows what pages are being visited, how many times each has been viewed, and how long visitors stay on that page.

To view the stats just click on the stats tab at the top of your admin screen.

If you are designing your own theme please make sure to insert {{ restaurant.stats_tracker }} right before the </body> tag in layout.liquid

We’re really excited about this feature and think it is going to help show how valuable having a web site is. If you have any questions or comments please let us know at support@sandwichboard.com

One of our newer customers, The Middlebrook Restaurant and Pub, decided to use the Default SandwichBoard theme but wanted something that better resembled their restaurant's branding. They worked with a local web designer to change the site's color scheme and the layout of the location map. The simple changes were a great branding move and resulted in a beautiful site. Check it out.

(For the technical among us: after they selected the appropriate colors, they were configured in the site.css and page.css, which control the styling of a site's theme and pages respectively.)