So, you have a website, you've make it look and work the way you want., You've got it hosted and and promoted. You had it optimized to make the search engines happy. You've put in al lot of time and money to get it just the way you want... 

How well is it doing?
How many people are finding it?
How are they finding it?
What do they like about it?
What do they dislike? 

    A valuable tool to answer theseand many similar questions is website statistics service.

Website Statistics – There are programs and services available which will keep track of various details about your web site traffic. The cost for these ranges from free to hundreds of dollars. You can do a search on ‘website statistics’ for a huge list (Google returned about 122 Million results.) Your goal here is to get an idea of who what, when, where, why and how people are visiting your website.

    Some typical data you can discover from a website statistics software package or service include:

a. What is the total number of people who visited my site this day/week/month/year?

b. What is the total number of unique visitors to my site? (Don’t count repeat visits.)

c. Did people visit more than once? If so, how many times?

d. Where are these visitors located geographically? (city, state, region, country)

e. What Internet Service providers do my visitors use?

f. How many pages of my site were viewed?

g. What pages did visitors look at?

h. How long did they stay on each page?





i. What are the most/least popular pages on my site?

j. What was the first page they came to?

k. What page were they on when they left my site?

l. How did they find my site?

1. Did they use a search engine?

2. Which search engine did they use?

3. What words did they search on?


4. Did they click a link to my site from some other website?

5. What website did they come from?

6. Did they get to my site from their own “Favorites” link on their computer?

m. Which search engine(s) do I get most of my traffic from?

n. Which search word(s) get used most to find my site?

o. What web browsers and versions are being used to view my site?

    A good statistics package will allow you to create reports and follow trends in your site's web traffic. While this data may seem overwhelming, it can be monitored to identify trends (good or bad) about how people find, interact with and leave your website. Such information can be used to make decisions about what is working well, what may need some improvement and what may need to be deleted on your site.

"SO, where can I get hold of one of these Statistic packages?" you may ask. And, if you've read any of my other blog entries, you'll recognize my usual answer:  Do a search for "website statistics" or a similar phrase and you'll find more suggestions than you can shake a USB port at.  While I do not officially endorse any specific package, I will say that if you do said search on Google, that the first Paid entry and the first Organic entry both fall to Google's own statistics package, "Google Analytics" and I understand it's free...