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Statistics updates and what they are good for

November 12, 2007 |

Analyzing stats isn’t something I’ve put a lot of consideration into. Mostly because I always always pleased with what I saw when I would check them. I’ve often checked my stats and said ‘Hey, thats neat’ when I should have been saying ‘Hey, thats neat. Now, how can I improve this?’

What is statistics tracking?

A traffic statistics update is a post made on a site or a blog that lists things like unique visitors pageviews, RSS subscription rates, bounce rates, and the like.

Furthermore, statistics like referrals, repeat visitors, hit counting and much more are made available through most major website traffic statistics trackers. Trackers will produce a report based on your visitors and what they are doing at your site. This report generally includes a lot of graphs and charts to visually demonstrate your stats. They are available on a monthly, weekly, daily and sometimes hourly basis, although the last three are only useful to sites with extremely high volumes of traffic.

Some of the more popular statistics analysis tools are:

• Mint - Mint is one of the most praised statistics analyzer around. Personally, I have had no experience with it, but a simple Google blog search will show you just how acclaimed this software is.
• Google Analytics - Google produces some very impressive reports with the trademark Google slickness. There are free and paid services available. It works by installing a small tracker code within your site’s source.
• Extreme Tracking - Extreme tracking is a much more bare bones analysis tool. Not as graphically pleasing as Mint or Google’s tools but definitely worth a look. Don’t let the website’s simplistic look fool you. It actually produces a quite robust analysis. Sign up to a free account on Extremetracking, install the ad code and go.

Many rely upon the statistics produced by cPanel. There are a few different options within cPanel and it is often bundled with the popular AwesomeStats tracker.Sites that statistics updates would work for:

• web/tech related sites
• personal blogs
• portfolio sites
• user driven/social media relative
• make money online sites
• dating sites

Sites that statistical updates wouldn’t work for:

In almost all of these cases there are some extents of statistical reporting that would be beneficial. Such as a Company site displaying their client base prominently on the front page. It communicates trust and reliability. People just generally don’t want to read about it regularly in your articles or blog posts.

• Niche sites
• Company sites
• News sites
• Entertainment/Media sites

Whether you plan to inform your readers how your traffic statistics are coming along or not, everyone can benefit from studying their website traffic. The best way to get more visitors is to look at the ones you have and what they are doing when they visit. Please choose one of the trackers listed here or find and share your own.

Tagged : blogging, Web Development

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