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Website statistics are one of the most important
resources a webmaster has to determine how his/her website
is doing. There's a lot of important information that can
be learned by studying your websites stats and I'm not just
talking about the juicy stuff like the number of unique
visitors per month or the amount of pageviews you get. Sure
that is important since it tells you whether your site is
growing or not, but it doesn't really help when it comes
to making your site more efficient and taking advantage
of your more popular pages.
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From my experience I would say the two most popular website stat
systems are Webalizer and AWstats, since both of them are included
in almost all CPanels for free. Both are very good stat system,
but I would definitely say Awstats is the better of the two because
it gives you more vital information. Although I still check both
to see if there is any discrepancy between stat figures.
Moving on, there are a lot of areas that are extremely important
to study when viewing your sites statistics. Here’s the list:
- Pages/URL
- Robots/Spiders
- Referring Sites
- Search Keywords
- HTTP Error codes
- Browsers
- Countries
- Visits duration
Pages/URL - I would say this is the most important statistic
to look at. You have to know what pages are most visited and use
that knowledge to cross link with your other pages. You don't
want to have 5 pages that are getting 10,000 hits/day and have
all your other pages getting 100. It's much better if you can
get 1000 hits on all your pages, so get those pages cross linked.
This is also important for ad placement if you want to generate
your maximum income.
Robots/Spiders - With search engines being what they are
today, you MUST make sure your website is being crawled. This
stat will tell you what spiders are crawling your site, how often
and how many pages they hit. It your stats are low here, start
optimizing your pages to be more crawler friendly.
Referring Sites - I would say this is probably one of
the most important stats to look at. Besides telling you how many
hits you are getting from sites linking to you, you can use this
list to find people stealing your content or images. Trust me,
I've found many sites through this method. This also tells you
how many people are bookmarking your site as well as how many
hits from search engines you’re getting. Very, very useful
stuff here.
Search Keywords - Well this is pretty obvious why this
is important, this is telling you how people are finding your
site through search engines. If you site is about cars and your
top key word is airplanes, you have some SEO work ahead of you.
HTTP Error codes - This is also very important because
it will tell you if any of your pages are broken. I can't tell
you how many times I have found broken pages getting 1,000 of
hits each month. Just makes you sick thinking about all the lost
traffic.
Browsers - This is one of the less important stats. When
creating a website you are trying to make it work in all browsers
regardless of the number of visitors using them. So this is more
of a stat just to cure your curiosity.
Countries - This is a pretty important stat if you are
trying to sell advertisement space. Advertisers will want to know
where your visitors live. I mean a car auto shop in the UK isn't
going to want to advertise on your site if 80% of your traffic
is US.
Visit Duration - This also is pretty important because
it tells you if your visitors are spending any time on your site.
You don't want to have 90% of your visitors leaving before 30
secs. That means your site either is too complicated, ugly or
just doesn't have enough content. Sorry, but it’s true.
That’s pretty much it for web stats. Make it a habit to
check your stats thoroughly at LEAST once a month, once a week
even. The more you know about your site's stats, the better you
can modify the site to reach its full potential. I hope you enjoyed
this article.
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