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Monthly Site Usage Statistics

The Web traffic-analysis market has only developed in the last few years. Today it is a multi-million dollar segment of the software industry. Clearly, this is being driven by the growth of the World Wide Web, and the desire to know as much as possible about visitors, through self-identification, registration, and Web logs.

Why Are Web-Traffic Statistics Important?
These statistics can be used to change your web site, as a result of visitor analysis, and to make alterations which can increase the site's popularity and marketing potential.

Each package may provide slightly different statistics but, typically, they let you know:

Who is visiting your web site
Which are the most popular browsers being used by visitors
Which Web search engines are used by visitors to find the site
If appropriate, which banner ads are bringing the most visitors
Where errors or bad links may be occurring in your Web pages

By analysing your web site log files, you can spot significant trends about your visitors and customers. For instance:

How many visitors your web site gets
How visitors normally find your web site
What key words and search phrases work best for finding your site
What are your most visited Web pages
How long your visitors stay on your web site
Which countries your visitors come from

From this information you can make design changes to improve the performance of your web site. For example:

You might spot a trend that indicates many of your visitors are coming from a particular search engine when they were looking for a specific product or service. When they get to this page, you want to make sure that it provides the right information to make the sale.
Your logs show that most people get to your "Widgets" page via a path through three other pages in your site. You want more traffic on this page, so you make the "Widgets" link on your home page more prominent.
Your log files show that your five different navigation-bar image files are the most frequently requested graphics, and that they appear to be slowing down some page loads. The page should be revised so that they consist of five separate smaller images, which load faster.

Basically, the information in your log files can help you improve many aspects of your site. Traffic-analysis software allows you to ask questions which help you fine-tune your Web marketing strategy, and Web marketing without statistical analysis can be ineffective.

Outlined below is the typical information that a Web Statistics program could produce, based on a hypothetical Web site.

Analysed requests from the first week of July 2001

Total completed requests: 100 000
Average completed requests per day: 14 517
Total failed requests: 947
Total redirected requests: 2 367
Number of distinct files requested: 783
Number of distinct hosts served: 7 679
Number of new hosts served in last 7 days: 5 843
Total data transferred: 522 446 Kbytes
Average data transferred per day: 75 635 Kbytes

The above indicates that there were 100,000 "hits" recorded for the week. However, a "hit" is any request for a file or graphic. Since each page usually has several graphics' files, this can be misleading and over-hype the number of actual visitors. A visitor may look at several Web pages during a visit and so a much more important statistic is the 7,679 "distinct hosts served," indicating that the site had approximately 7,679 different visitors that week. The term "approximately" is used since if a person came back a second time that week, they would probably be recorded as a different entity.

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