Web Statistics

To make the most out of your website you need to know how many people are visit your site and how they find it. Most web hosts give you access to this information (and a lot more) in the form of web statistics.

Special software installed on your web hosting server logs all visits to your site creating log files. Log files contain information about the visitors origin (their IP address), the browser they were using, the pages they viewed, how long they stayed, whether they arrived from a search engine and if so, what keywords they used to locate your site.

Raw log files are long lists of numbers and cryptic words that can be read with the aid of a statistics program. These programs take the raw server logs and parse them into readable (and sometimes colourful) charts that are fairly easy to interpret.

Stats programs divide the information of the log files into useful categories. They usually display the summary of the data at the top of the readout with information such as unique visitors, number of hits, and number of pages.

Not all this information is important. The number of hits, for instance, counts the total number of requests for any individual page of your site including images, script files and any other files included on that page. If your page consists of 4 images and 2 other files, the hit count increases by 7 every time someone views that page.

The number of page views is important. By knowing which pages are visited most often you can fine-tune your site by dropping or modifying undeperforming pages and promoting the popular ones.

Popular entry and exit pages are worth tweaking as well. Visitors will not always arrive at your site through the homepage, especially if they've found your site through a search engine. Ensure that popular entry pages contain relevant information and adjust exit pages to be more appealing. Exit pages should provide one last chance for them to buy or bookmark your site for future reference.

Websites that link to your site will be shown as referring sites. If your visitors were referred by a search engine you will also see what keywords they used to find your site. You will know which keywords are important for optimizing your site. You can create new content based on these keywords to attract even more visitors.

If you prefer not to rely on the statistics produced by your web host software, you can get a third party service to monitor your web site. These services range from basic counter, offering less information than your server does, to comprehensive client-side stats collection.

Third party services may be useful when you need more precise information about your visitors. All visitors from a large organization may appear to be the same because they all have the same IP address. Stat services can break down IP addresses into individual users.

You can use more precise data for monitoring of your website and for targeting specific niches.

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