OK we get this question a lot and occassionally our customers look at their stats, but many don’t really know how useful they can be. If you aren’t doing a lot of promotion or advertising of your site then we are looking at statistics for what we call “natural progression.” What does this mean? Well it means are you getting more users month to month? Are they going up and where are they coming from? One of the things users need to understand is that stats can be confusing, but there are things we can do to make them more useful and readable:

1. We can group categories of items into one block – like your images so instead of seeings stats on hundreds of images (which noone cares about) we can group these so that hits on the images show as one whole item instead of 100 individual ones
2. We can hide or eliminate groups of items – for instance noone cares how many hits their style sheet got
3. We can really adjust and group just about any part of your stats system – we use webalizer (www.webalizer.com) which is a great tool and very customizable.

If you ARE doing a lot of advertising and online ad placement etc. – even newspaper or magazine ads we can help their too:

1. We can use false URLs that showup in your stats, but really just take your users to an existing page. What does this do?
2. It really helps you see what your ads are doing and how they are doing – take for example Ford Motor company – you occassionally see ads on TV where they list a url like: www.ford.com/newcars07 or something like that. If you go out to their site you see the url is actually www.ford.com/newcars.asp or something like that. Why do they do that? To see how many users come from their TV commercials compared to other advertising.

So what’s the point? The point is if you want to know how effective your advertising is we can help, whether that be TV ads, magazine ads, etc. AND we can assist you in reading your statistical information and making it an important part of your advertising and sales analysis tools.

If you don’t currently use your website to gather statistical information about your adveritsing then you should get in touch with our website success department today!