More Web Site Traffic
Stats
In the first installment of this series on web site traffic stats, we began
with an introduction to Awstats and what you can expect to find there. In this
final installment, we're going to take a look at the rest of Awstats, which
actually breaks your web site traffic down quite well. If you can't figure out
how well your web site is doing from these stats then you need to take a better
look. This is actually one very powerful web
site traffic program and I'd be lost without it.
We left off with looking at the days of the week to see what our best days
are. The next section of Awstats will show you
the traffic that you're getting broken down into the hours of the day. I think
you will find that most of your traffic comes in the morning and evening.
During the day web site traffic is usually pretty dead with people being at
work.
The next section will give you a breakdown
of your web site traffic by country. You will probably
find that most of your traffic comes from the United
States. However, this too will vary
depending on the site itself. If you have a site on German Politics, most of
your web site traffic will probably come from Germany.
The next section will give you your traffic
by IP address. I don't really know why they include this. It's not like you're
going to know who these people are. But it's there if you want it. Personally,
I hardly ever look at it.
The next section will show you any robots
and spiders that have been to your site. This
is important to get your site up the search engine ranks. At first, you won't
have many. But as your site has been around longer, you'll see more robots
and spiders coming to your site. This lets you
know, on how many search engines your site is indexed.
The next section shows you the duration of
visits to your site. Take note of this. If
most people are at your site under 30 seconds, then they are not finding what
they are looking for. You want the durations to be as long as possible.
Under that, you will find the pages of your site that people have gone to. This
is important because it shows you the pages of your web site that are most
popular. This way, you can work on improving
the pages that aren't getting as many views.
The next section shows from what external
web sites your traffic is coming from. This
may be the most important stat on the page. If you are doing external
advertising on other web sites, you want to know that your advertising efforts
are paying off. If you don't see a lot of traffic coming from those sites then
you might want to reconsider continuing your promotions. Conversely, if you
find a site that is sending you a ton of traffic, you want to continue your
efforts there.
You may have noticed that I have skipped a few sections. The
reason is because some of that information I don't really feel is all that
important. What I covered here are the basic things you should look at, with
the exception of the IP address section.
I only pointed that out because I
don't get it at all, unless of course you have the time to look up all those IP
addresses. I know I don't. Hope these stats have been helpful to you in
tracking your web site traffic.
Source:
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