Guide to Website Statistics Importance of Feedback | Information Available | Hosting Solutions | Monitoring Services   Introduction -  Statistics are a critical way to analyse your success.  Website Statistics can provide you with a huge range of information was such as the behaviour of the users, lead and sale conversion ratios and which search engine customers used and what searched termed a typed into it.   Why are Website Statistics so Important? - unless you come up with a a full proof flawless marketing plan to make money you will need statistics to understand what works and what does not. Without visibility and proactive decision making, (based on statistical feedback), your online marketing strategy will probably fail. Statistics are important because they:- Understand the Profile of your Visitors - building up a picture of who your visitors are, which country they live in, which search engines the use and what search queries are used to find your site, gives you an overall picture of your site visitors. If the number of keyphrase used by visitors increases, it indicates greater search engine visibility. Understand your most popular 'search term' and your most popular 'entry page' to build up a mental picture in your mind of visitor habits and motivation. Without an overall gut feel from your statistics, it can be quite hard to decide whether or not your marketing messages and sales copy are being affective. Validate Your Business Assumptions - inevitably your original plan will need to change based on the success or failure of your website and in particular, individual web pages. If you have optimized your pages for a particular set of key phrases and you're not yet generating enough website traffic, something needs to be changed. Try and be patient with your original assumptions as online marketing success does not happen overnight. Refer back to your original goals and see if you are attracting the right sort of traffic (but just on a small scale). If the trend is upwards, do more of the same. It takes anything between two weeks and three months just for a web site to be fully copied and listed in search engines any way. So statistics in the first month or two are not particularly relevant to establishing and understanding trends. Justify Pay-per-click Investment - if your only online marketing strategy is to invest in pay-per-click advertising, statistics represents the bedrock of measuring profit or loss. Your statistics will help you calculate the return on investment based on the number of visitors, the average conversion rate per visitor and pay-per-click campaign spend per page. For instance, if you're using Google Adwords, make sure what you host the campaign on a trackable, unique non cacheable webpage. By comparing stats of the number of 'click throughs' and subsequent sale conversions from that particular page, (with the cost of the advertising as a result of the clicks), return on investment can be accurately calculated.  The Click Through Rate (CTR) is the amount of times an advertisement is clicked on divided by the number of times it is displayed (impression).  What Statistical Information is Available? - with most commercial hosting packages these days, the provider includes a statistics option.  Normally this is chargeable. Most packages come with easy to understand graphs, charts and maps to give you a snapshot of what is going on.  The features of the main packages are as follows:- Hits, Visits, Visitor and Unique Visitors - packages can distinguished between Hits which are typically a hitting a web page In order to cache it, and real human visitors... A person can visit a website and click on eight different pages, representing eight hits. That same person (with a unique IP address) may return the next day and be counted again as a visitor. You should be primarily interested in unique visitors. These figures are collated on a daily, weekly and monthly timeframe. Stats are also available on which search bots from which search engine have visited to cache or re-cache your web pages. Most packages also provide you with the amount of time an average user spends on site before they leave; your aim is to increase the average time by user spends on site as the site ages. Entry and Exit Paths - typically after your site visitors will find your website via your homepage. The other half but find it via an entry path from one of your other pages. Tracking how people enter your site is critical in understanding your search engine ranking success for individual pages. Referrals - stats packages are great at telling you the names of other web sites that have links to your website and the number of visitors they have to sent you over a given period (as people click on the link to your site). What most packages can also tell you what browser the user was using when they viewed your website and what their individual IP addresses. This information is useful because it tells you which geography is around world your visitors are coming from. It may show that the bulk of your traffic comes from of a country that your products and services are not relevant. If this is the case your can take what action to change your online marketing tactics. Search Engines - statistics are normally available to what summarise the exact or keyphrase each individual visit used and which search engine they used in order to find your site. This is critical information and should be monitored on a daily basis   Hosting Based Stats Options - Most shared hosting comes with statistical options. We have summarised the major ones below for you:- Smarter Stats - smarter stats provides a very comprehensive range of statistics.  It can be quite cumbersome to use for novice users (as there are many web pages to open and understand).  It can provide a timeframe based analysis of visors by IP, recent, spiders, views per visit, monthly visitors and average visit length on site. It tracks entry and exit paths by filename and shows Referrals by keyphrase source, search engine and individual keyword.  Its geographic country maps help you understand where your site visitors live. AwStats - AwStats is a widely used and free Perl based stats log analysis application.   It is based around one summary page of all criteria described above. It can be download under a GNU General Public License. It breaks stats out into daily, weekly and monthly time periods. Webalizer - one of the older log analysis tools providing a one page overview of basic site based information. It usually comes free with shared hosting packages. Online Monitoring Services  - there are also online services that provide similar information .We have summarised the major ones below for you:- Google Analytics - this is a fantastic free online service that makes obtaining feedback simple.  You need to register for approval from Google (which only takes a day or two.  After that, by simply placing a piece of unique script in the <body> of any webpage you want to track to can understand your site usage by 4 main areas; Visitors, Traffic Sources, Content and Goals.  Its easy to use interface is ideal for the novice webmaster. Onestat -  Advanced web analytics to track in-depth visitor behaviour, commerce, leads, click fraud and conversions.  Professional web analytics software to track your web site, unique visitors, visitor behaviour, search engines and online commerce and advertising campaigns. Statcounter - a similar service providing: Invisible Counter Option, Configurable Counter (script that tracks the amount of unique visitors that view that web page or entire web site), Configurable Summary Stats, Magnify User, Drill Down, Popular Pages, Entry Pages, Exit Pages, Came From, Keyword Analysis, Recent Keyword Activity, Search Engine Wars, Visitor Paths, Visit Length, Returning Visits, Recent Pageload Activity, Recent Visitor Activity, Country/State/City Stats