Web Site Management: Statistics
Statistics are your most important resource! Used properly, web
site statistics will tell you who is visiting your site, where
they came from, what search engines they used, their browser
types and even their monitor resolutions.
These statistics are critical for your survival as a webmaster.
You MUST know what's going on with your site. Is it being
visited and who is visiting it? What pages are people visiting?
These are essential statistics that you must watch carefully and
often.
Why? To improve your site and it's ability to fulfill it's
purpose. You've put a lot of work into creating a site and you
want it to accomplish some goal. In order to know if you are
achieving the goal, you must look at what's going on.
I guess the first question a webmaster asks is "is anyone
visiting my site at all?" A hit counter fulfills this need
nicely. You can create a simple one with CGI, you can use a
built-in feature if you use Frontpage 2000, or you can use any
number of free or almost free hit counters available all over
the web.
For the more complex questions I would recommend a good
statistics package. If you are running your own server you have
it made - lots of tools are available. Otherwise, you would be
best served to use one of the free services available. Some good
ones are listed below.
- Hitbox - Counter.Com
If you are being hosted on one of the many commercial or free
sites, it's certain that they have a statistics package of one
sort or another available.
But perhaps you're wondering why you need this data? What's it
really for? Well, let's say you have written a site to sell
stamps. You have four pages to the site. You look at the hit
counter and see 400 people visited it yesterday, but only 3 of
them bothered to visit your page to see what they could
purchase. In addition, you also see that there were no visitors
from yahoo.com and only a few from other search engines.
Now you have some things that you can do. You can come up with a
better design to get your users to the page where they purchase
stamps. You can see if your site is listed with yahoo.com and if
not, fix it. And you can check the rankings with other search
engines and fix what's going on there.
Another statistic might be monitor size. Let's say you designed
your site for 1024X768 resolution. You look at your statistics
and you find that 80% of the visitors have 800X600 screens.
Additionally, you see that there were few hits on the inner
pages on your site. In this case, you might conclude your
visitors are being turned off because your site does not fit on
their screen. A redesign might be appropriate.