Understanding Your Website Statistics

Viewing your web statistics can be darn right addicting. It's also an important component of a search engine optimization program.


Daily Statistics for September 2006

Day	Hits		Files		Pages		Visits		Sites		KBytes

12	104	24.59%	38	28.36%	42	31.11%	16	51.61%	8	40.00%	754	21.68%
13	141	33.33%	44	32.84%	32	23.70%	5	16.13%	6	30.00%	379	10.90%
14	160	37.83%	52	38.81%	58	42.96%	7	22.58%	5	25.00%	2338	67.22%
15	3	0.71%	0	0.00%	1	0.74%	1	3.23%	3	15.00%	1	0.02%
16	15	3.55%	0	0.00%	2	1.48%	2	6.45%	3	15.00%	6	0.17%

By spending a little time each month studying your web traffic report you can discover:

The region of the country or world where your visitors are located
Average length of time the visitor spends on your site
Average number of hits or page views your site gets per day
The most and least requested pages
Top entry page
Top exit page
The number of times your site was unavailable and delivered an error message (404 Not Found, for example)
Top referring sites
Top search engines that referred your URL
Top search engine keywords visitors used to find your site

Imagine the possibility of using these statistics! Armed with the above information, you'll be profiling your visitors and tracking their habits like Agent 007 in no time.

If you notice that most of your site traffic is coming from a particular search engine, you might consider enhancing your content with more keywords to increase your ranking in that engine even higher. How do you know which keywords brings traffic? From your traffic logs of course. On the other hand, if you'd like to receive more traffic from a certain engine, you know what isn't working on your site for their indexing criteria and you can change it accordingly. You'll be able to make modifications as fast or slow as you'd like and monitor the results through your log files.

Check your error messages carefully. If your site has a high number of error messages, you could be missing out on potential business. Determine the cause of these error messages; contact your hosting provider if you need assistance.

Take a look at the keywords that bring you the most traffic. Take that list and compare it to how many times those words are used in your site. If they're not too prevalent, perhaps revising the copy to be more keyword rich will help. If you need some help with this, just ask us!

Top entry page is the page where your visitors enter your site most often. Generally this is the home page, but not necessarily. Whatever page it is, take a close look at it and make sure this is the first impression you want to give your visitors. The same concept applies to the exit page. Review the top exit page and make sure people aren't leaving at that page because there is something wrong with it. The exit page could be perfectly fine. For example, if your goal is receiving sign-ups for your eZine then the "Thank you for subscribing" page is exactly what you want for a top exit page.

Why in the world would most of your visitors be located in Dallas, Texas? Who cares! The fact is that for some reason you have quite the following in that neck of the woods and you can use this to your advantage. Consider doing some off-line marketing in newsletters, magazines, etc. targeted to that region. The fact that you receive so much traffic from there means you're one step ahead in recognition and your efforts may have a better chance of succeeding. You may have discovered your target market just by analyzing your web traffic. Yee-haw!

Before you go running off to analyze your traffic and curse us in frustration upon seeing the jargon, let's review the definitions.

Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in something being sent back to the user.
Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server.
Visits occur when a remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time.
Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested.
URL (Uniform Resource Locator) - All requests made to a web server need to request something. A URL is that something.
Entry/Exit pages are those pages that were the first requested in a visit (Entry), and the last requested (Exit).
Referrers are those URLs that lead a user to your site.
Search Strings - Basically these are the words people are using in the search engines to find your site.
User Agents - a fancy name for browsers.
Countries are determined based on the location of the requesting site.

And there you have it. Knowing how to analyze your site traffic isn't a task for web weenies only; it's a great way to maximize your site's effectiveness. AKA - your online success.

*If you are unsure how to access your site statistics or have lost your password, please contact us.

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