Web Site Traffic Stats

If you have your own web site, one of the most important things you need to do is track your web site traffic stats. Otherwise, you will have no way of knowing how much traffic you're getting, what kind of traffic it is and where it's coming from. Any successful businessman will tell you that not knowing these stats is an invitation to failure. This article will alert you to some of the things you should keep track of and how you can find this information. Hopefully, this information will help you fix whatever is wrong with the traffic you're getting, or not getting.

If you have a professionally hosted web site, you don't have to look far to find your traffic stats. Most professionally hosted sites come with AWstats, which is probably the most popular traffic stats program on the Internet. Yes, there are others, and some of them are even more powerful, but AWStats will be more than good enough for your purposes, especially if you're just started out, as you'll have all you can handle just trying to understand these stats.

When you log into your control panel, you should see an icon that says "web stats" or something like that. If you click on it, you should be brought to another menu of options. One of these options should read "AWstats". If you click on that, you'll be taken to the AWStats program. Once there, you are going to see a page filled with information that is broken up into sections, which is a good thing because there is a ton there.

The first thing you're going to see is a quick summary of the current month which will show you unique visitors, number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth. A unique visitor is one who has visited your site once in a specific time frame. For most sites, this is determined by daily visits. So if a person goes to your site 15 times in a day, he's just one unique visitor, but if he goes back to your site the next day, he's considered a unique visitor for that day. Some sites will only consider unique visitors on a monthly basis. You'll have to contact your web host to find out how yours are calculated.

Under that section, you'll have another section of monthly traffic stats. This will give you the total number of visitors for each month. This is important to look at so you can see if your traffic is increasing or decreasing. hopefully, you will see a consistent increase each month.

Below that, you will see a breakdown of the traffic for each day of the current month. This way you can tell which days of the month are your best as far as generating traffic. Most people find that during the week is much better than on the weekends. Of course this also depends on what niche you're in.

There's a lot more on the page which we will get into in our next article. What we've covered so far should give you a pretty good idea of what you're traffic is like.

See you next time with more

To YOUR Success