Why Are Website Hit Statistics so Important to Your Sites Success

Good website traffic stats should give more information than you need, after all its better to have too much than too little and what you need to report on today could change tomorrow.

What do we need to be able to see?

Visits -
How many people actually visit your site? This includes repeat visits though so this can give an inaccurate picture of how many people are coming to your site, but is useful to see.



Unique Visitors -
This is perhaps the most accurate single way of seeing if you site is becoming more popular, its nice to see repeat visitors, but if your site is good you should see the increase in return visitors increase.

Time on site –
The amount of time the average person spends on your site varies between types of site, for example if you sell specific products then the time will usually be less than the average time of an information site whereas someone will usually read more.

Geographical locations -
Knowing where your visitors are coming from provides valuable information in terms of being able to tailor your website to your market, this is even more valuable as it allows you to add advertiser information to this area

Break down of which page visited -
Knowing which pages are your most popular means you are on the right track, now you have a bench mark for how popular your other pages could be and now it’s a question of comparing page elements  to get more from your less popular pages.

Which ad or ads are getting clicked –
Knowing which products sell or which ads or ad styles work for your site could mean the difference between making pennies or real money.

Your most popular keywords -
Being able to see your most popular keywords is a good way to see the direction to expand your site, if you are ranking well for particular keywords write more articles around these with links from your original pages using the keywords.

Which search engines are giving you which traffic
You should aim to get good listings in all the big search engines – Google – Yahoo and MSN, but if your rankings are low or nonexistent in one then research why, Initially Google can be very difficult to get into, but once you are in your indexed pages count should grow quickly.
Another good point to monitoring where your traffic is coming from is traffic fluctuations; you can see which search engines are listing or dropping pages as your visitors increases or decreases.

All of this should be exportable and it should keep reports on the last year –
Your should keep accurate reports of your websites stats going back as far as possible, this will give you a clearer picture of how your website is doing compared to say a year ago, and once you have 2, 3 or 4 years under your belt you can begin to forecast traffic, earnings etc.

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I have had my site now for around 3.5 years and it is nice to look back and see the traffic stats from beginning to now, it gives me a real buzz to see how much the site has grown and know it is still growing, look at earnings from a year ago today and compare the two.

Never take the results of a single set of stats as accurate, a prime example of this is the Alexa stats – generally the more you visit the better your ranking gets, so take the overall view, check overall stats from 2 or more sources, and at the end of the day remember it is all relative – as your traffic increases so will your earnings, so will your ranking on your sites stats from multiple sources, if they are giving a true picture then all stat sources will more or less grow or fall in line with one another.

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computer adviser website hit statistics article