So you've got your new website up and running and you've done some advertising to get people to visit. How do you know whether they're actually coming or not?

Most web hosting plans include some sort of statistics package. This software will tell you all kinds of information about your visitors, not just how many you're getting.

All visitors coming to your website get logged by your web server. They automatically create log files with information like your visitors' origin (their IP address), what browser software they're using, the pages they looked at, how long they stayed on your site, whether they arrived by clicking a link from a search engine and if so, they keywords they used when running the search.

The trouble with these log files is they're practically impossible to make sense out of. They're really just long lists of numbers and words that are very cryptic and hard for the average person to decipher.

Statistics software will take these hard-to-understand logs and convert them into a format that is easy for the average person to understand. Most of them will create both reports and charts to show you what your visitors are doing on your site.

Statistics programs are included with most hosting plans. There are a few different ones available, so it will depend on your host, but they're usually accessed through the control panel for your website.

Three of the most popular stats packages are Analog, AWStats and Webalizer. Part of the reason they're so popular is because they are all free.

What Do You Really Need to Know?

These stats programs give you all kinds of interesting information about your website traffic, but not all of it is really that important.

For example, they will all show you the number of hits your website has received. Hits are a little misleading though - they're not the number of people visiting your site.

Hits are actually requests for files, so every single file that gets requested logs 1 hit. If you home page has 6 images and 2 include files, your stats software will register 9 hits every time that page gets loaded (1 for the page itself, 6 for the images and 2 for the includes).

Some of the more important stats to look at include:

- Number of visits
- Page views (you can use this to see which pages are most popular)
- Popular entry and exit pages
- Referring sites
- Referring keywords, if referred from a search engine

By tracking these stats and tweaking things that are related to them you can improve your site's success with your visitors, whether that means more sales, staying on the site longer, more people signing up for your email newsletter, or anything else.