Internet Marketing Tycoon

**picklezone** · 03-31-2006, 01:50 PM

Hello All -

I have been reviewing website stats for several years, but have to confess that I still don't have a best practice handle on interpretation. Most of the sites we manage now use cPanel that comes with "Webalizer" and "Awstats" packages. The two programs each have their own strengths... but they don't report totals the same way.

So, I thought we could knock around our experiences with stats and how we interpret them to see if collectively we can come out wiser.

I'll start with my own take. I'm attaching a JPG of the last 3-months of stats for a site I manage taken from the summary page in Webalizer. It gives daily averages and monthly totals for Hits, Files, Pages, Visits (Daily), and Sites, KBytes, VIsits Pages, Files and Hits (monthly). Let's try and do two things:

Ask what important conclusion can we draw from this summary (see JPG)
Rank and define the other important analyses a good stat program will give us

First... some resources:

Quick Definition List for Webalizer (ie. what is a "site"?)
Webalyzer chat group on Yahoo - home page

Okay... now to answer the first question (your input/thoughts requested)... what conclusions can we draw from the summary:

In the attached example, the number of Visits as compared to Sites is increasing, therefore more visitors are returning to this site each month.
Visits per Day are increasing more than "Pages" in the last three months, so repeat visitors are returning to fewer pages when they visit. This could mean that they have found a favorite page (ie. online tools) they bookmarked?

Hopefully you will challenge or confirm those assumptions, and add some of your own below.

Now... the final question (related to the poll) is: Rank and define the other important analyses a good stat program will give us...

Determine most popular pages in site
What percentage of visitors are bookmarking our sites (Awstats gives you this, Webalizer does not)
Determine from which pages people "exit" your site
Determine from what countries your traffic originates
Determine search terms that sent visitors to your site
Review what sites your visitors were at prior to clicking over to your site
Other: ____________________

I haven't ranked these in order of importance since that will vary from site to site, and our poll and discussion here should give us some answers.

Thanks for your participation and insights.

Scott

**chrishirst** · 03-31-2006, 03:00 PM

you missed out "All of the Above"

webalyser stats are about the worst possible. IM(not so)HO of course.

Quote:

What percentage of visitors are bookmarking our sites

this is a meaningless guess from all stats package, it's usually based on hits with no referer.

The important stats are (not in order);
1/ Referrers
2/ Search terms and entry page
3/ exit pages and length of stay

most important though is;
what are the best converting visits from 1 & 2

they way most stats packages interpret results are flawed this for these instances

Quote:

In the attached example, the number of Visits as compared to Sites is increasing, therefore more visitors are returning to this site each month.
Visits per Day are increasing more than "Pages" in the last three months, so repeat visitors are returning to fewer pages when they visit. This could mean that they have found a favorite page (ie. online tools) they bookmarked?

so it will be in error as it probably won't differentiate between crawlers, scrapers and genuine browsers.
Visitors from ISPs such as AOL also cause inaccuracies as all AOL share about 10 IPs because they are routed through proxy servers.

**mad_hatter_29** · 04-02-2006, 04:06 PM

You missed off probably the most important statistic that people might be interested in:

Originator.
When a noob starts a site and launches 'n' traffic campaigns the most important thing for them is to understand where the traffic is coming from (and how it is converting).

For instance, I have several adwords campaigns on the roll, I also have a mive and several traffic exchange campaigns (plus others), so the most important thing for me is to be able to gauge both which source is sending the most traffic and the relative quality of that traffic.

This becomes a real point of order when considering name squeeze pages.
The real kicker with this type of analysis is that it can save you money if you get it right:

my adwords campaigns give a 24% sign up
my miva campaign gives me 43% sign up

Miva delivers less clicks but the quality is higher
my miva campaign is also cheaper than the adwords campaign
- so I now know that I can increase my budget for miva and hopefully the results will increase in a linear manner (or close to it).

Hope this helps,
Ed.

**picklezone** · 04-02-2006, 05:56 PM

Hi Guys --

Hey... thanks Ed & Chris ... you both made excellent points. What is your best method of tracking conversions -- Google?

Yours - SCott