One of the most under-utilized tools that many website owners fail to exploit the value of is web statistics. This may be perhaps because of their lack of understanding about what these tools do, or because they probably aren’t aware of how easy it is to access, install and use.
Using web statistics tools properly and effectively will reap great benefits on any website. As soon as one is installed and activated, simply by copying a code on from web statistics site and pasting it on your html pages, it begins to record and save all traffic to your site. This accumulated data is broken down into daily, weekly, monthly or yearly averages that can be called up on your screen any time you want.
The numbers generated by a web statistics or analytics tool will give you an extensive look at your trend data, or how well your website is performing at any given day over a certain time period. It will tell you who looks at your website, where they come from, how they get in, how they leave, and what search terms they keyed into the search engines to get directed to your site.
This information is indicative of how your website is executing its functions. For instance, if you generate a low volume of inquiries, it will tell you that your traffic is low. It will also tell you if any advertising campaigns you run on-site have been successful judged from the number of visitors to your website during the period of the campaign.
Going through the history of your website statistics will help you evaluate your website’s performance during any given time, monitor what affects your trend data, and give you an idea of what to do to ensure that your website continues to grow and develop.
With a good web statistics tool, a website owner should be able to see the number of hits a website gets. This depends on the content of your pages, so if you have one visitor that clicks on your homepage, and you have 8 images there, you will get 9 hits. One for the visitor, and 8 for the images.
While hits may not be a reliable indicator of your site’s traffic, visits or sessions are. This gives you the number of people who have visited your site, including return visitors. The Referrer data will then tell you how many people got to your site via the search engines, or from links on other sites.
You will also get information about the entry and exits pages, which are the pages where each visitor got into your site, and the pages from which they jumped off. Search string data will tell you which words or phrases people used to find your site, and will indicate if the keywords you’ve used are successful. You will even learn the country of origin of each of your visitors, letting your know how global your website’s reach is, and if you’ve accomplished your geographical targets.
All this information may prove to be priceless for the website owner should he choose to utilize this valuable resource in deciding the direction his site should take. GoStats, a reliable web traffic counter service understands just how important it is to have useful trend data at your fingertips.
Satisfying clients since 1999, GoStats has exploited the full use of web statistics for their clients’ benefits. Offering free web stat counters, as well as upgrades to a more comprehensive professional version, GoStats provides a powerful web statistics reporting engine, a choice of visible or private web counters, world map traffic data, an account management control panel, and optimal listing on their top sites list.
Getting GoStats traffic analysis software is a first step on the way to putting your website alongside the list of the most successful sites the World Wide Web over.
Click here to start using web stats to your advantage today!
