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 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 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 is usually pretty dead with people ar work.

The next section will give you a breakdown of your 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 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 never 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.

The next section shows you the duration of visits to your site. This is important. 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 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 traffic.

To YOUR Success