Web Statistics

Web Statistics
By Clare Lawrence 15th August 2004

Web statistics are a vital part of promoting your website.

On the Internet it's very easy to spend dollars on advertising and pay per click and be disappointed with the results.

By using web statistics properly, you can monitor what works and what doesn't.

Web servers collect logs of site activity but you need software such as the great free product webaliser to monitor and interpret them.

Webaliser turns these 'rawlogs' into a helpful Html format. This tells you a lot of helpful and interesting things, such as:-

How many visitors does your site actually get a day and per month?

Where are they coming from?

How did they get to your site?

Which pages on your site are getting visitors and which are not?

What key-phrases are being used?

By carefully monitoring these results, you can experiment with promotional campaigns, monitor the results and hopefully refine your campaigns.

Its much harder to benchmark your site against rival sites, but there are a number of sites that can give you an approximate idea of other sites traffic such as Alexa, www.alexa.com

Alex uses the activity of 100,000's of users toolbars to record visits and shares this information on its website.

If your sites not showing up on Alexa, then use their add url feature http://pages.alexa.com/help/webmasters/