Article Discussion: Learning from your web statistics

If you know what you're looking at, your web site statistics can give you a lot of information.  They can also give you clues on how to draw more visitors to your site.   

Popular Pages
Every web statistics package I know of displays a list of what pages are being visited, and how often.   Knowing which pages your visitors visit is critical.  Are people looking at your portfolio?  Is your web site drawing them to your contact page?  What about that great article you wrote on wedding cakes?  Checking page views is a great way to tell how successful your pages are.

Ideas for more pages
Continuing from above, looking at what pages are popular gives you hints to what people are looking for on your site.  If you have a page on gold wedding bands that has dozens of visitors a month maybe you should add one on platinum rings.  Maybe silver.  You get the idea. 

Know where your traffic is coming from
By looking in your referer (yes, I know it's misspelled; it was misspelled in the original specifications) logs you can learn how your visitors are coming to your site.

The first group to look at is those that are coming from direct links.  These can be coming from postings you've made on forums, online ads you've placed, or people linking to your site because they like your work.  Or it could be someone badmouthing you.  It pays to know who is linking to you.

The other group of incoming links to look at is search engine referrals.  Not only will you find what search engines are sending you traffic, you will also see what people are searching to find your site.  This can give you ideas for pages as well.  You will probably get most of your search engine traffic from Google, followed by Yahoo and MSN, followed by a smattering of the smaller engines like DogPile and Ask.  What's important about visitors from search engines is that it's traffic you didn't have to pay for.

Know what's working
How long do your visitors stay on your site?  Are they looking at your portfolio?  Any one picture getting more views than the others?   You can get hints about what parts of your site are working and which are not.

Some web statistics programs can tell you what path visitors took through your site.  This will tell you more about your visitors than any other statistic.  By knowing that the average visitor goes from your home page to your portfolio to your contact page, you'll know that your site is working.  If the never get to the contact page, maybe something else needs to be done.

You can also find out how long the typical visitor stays on your site.  If your average is only a few seconds you may need to work on something to draw your visitors in.   

Know what's not working
If your site is not working you need to know.  Most web statistics programs will show you a list of pages that visitors tried to open and were not found.  You will normally have a few of these as people mistype addresses, but if you are trying to display an image on your main page and messed up the link this can show you.  Stats will also show you if certain pages cause server errors - more common with dynamic sites.

Which One?
Yes, there are dozens of web statistics programs. So which one to use?  Personally, I use both AWStats and Google Analytics.  AWStats gives me very clean statistics about my visitors.  Google Analytics allows me to track my visitors a little more closely and correlate the visits with where they came from.  For example, with Analytics it is possible for me to know that 12% of the visitors that came to my site from a link on abc.com went on to my contact page.

Fortunately, both of these are free.  Analytics is a program you sign up and are given a small piece of javascript code to put on your page.  AWStats runs on your server and directly analyzes your web server log files.  Most hosting packages, especially those using cPanel, have AWStats installed by default.