One of the ways you can tell if your web site is giving you a good return on investment is by looking at your site statistics.

Yes, I used the ‘S’ word.  Most small business owners don’t particularly enjoy doing things like statistical analysis.  Even if you do, finding the time to do these things is tough.  So, here’s a crash course that will let you look at the most important aspects of your site stats quickly (You pocket-protecter loving folks might enjoy this comprehensive Wikipedia article on the subject).

First, let’s look at how the data is collected. There are two basic ways to gather site visitation data:

Log file statistics are literal; think of them like making chit marks on a sheet of paper every time something happens.  Someone visits your site and the home page loads.  That’s one chit for the page loading, one for a user with a 17″ monitor, one for a user of Internet Explorer 6, one for someone coming via your Internet Service Provider, one for a visitor at 10:16 am on June 30th, etc.

Tagging involves using Ajax, javascripts, ‘cookies’ and the like (that’s code, folks) to gather information.  While these tools can be quite accurate, they are much better at showing patterns of traffic than literal information.   The big advantage of tagging is that you don’t have to have access to the computer that hosts your site in order to use this method.

Once the data is collected, there are two general approaches to reporting.  One is literal; the other interpretive.  Each has advantages and disadvantages.  What’s most important is that you know which you’re looking at so you know what’s literal and what’s interpretive.

All of the sites we host come with a program called “AW Stats”, which is a logfile statistics reading program.  It includes both literal and interpretive data.  Here’s a screen shot of the summary report (click the image for a closer view):

In this program, cool colors (blue, cyan & green) depict literal data and warm colors (orange, yellow) show interpretive data.   Bandwidth (green) is something you only care about if you don’t have enough of it; we’ll ignore that for now.  Hits (cyan), at one time, were the be all, end all, of statistics and, way back at the beginning of the internet, they told us something.  Sort of.  Nowadays, you should really just ignore that column.   If you want to discuss why, zap us a woof.

Pages (blue) are where things start to get interesting.  This number represents literally the number of pages that have loaded.  It doesn’t say if they were by one person or all unique individuals.  It doesn’t tell you home page vs. contact page.  It is the sum total of all the pages viewed.  Beneath it is an interpretive statistic, the number of pages per visit.  There is NO WAY of accurately knowing how many visitors there were to your site, so there is no way that this number is 100% true.  It is, however, a reasonable (and useful!) guesstimate.

Which brings us to the warm colors.  Again, there is no way to gather this information in a completely scientific way.  They are reasonable approximations and, so long as you think of them in terms of patterns, the information is valuable.

Most of our clients are interested in the orange, yellow and blue columns of the report since these are going to give them the most useful information to follow over time when determining how their site is functioning.

So what else do you need to know?  It depends.

Do you pay for ads to your site?  If so, look at the REFERRER report, as it tells you were folks were before they arrived at your site.

Want to know when folks are most likely visiting your site so you can send that broadcast email at just the right date and time?  You’ll be interested in the DAYS OF THE WEEK and HOURS OF THE DAY reports.

Is it important which pages of your site people are visiting?  Then you’ll want to pay attention to the PAGES report as it tells you how many times each has loaded and whether you need to make changes to encourage a different visitation pattern.

Are you trying to compete in the search engines?  The KEY PHRASES  and REFERRING SEARCH ENGINES reports are going to give you information that will show you which engines and terms are working for you and, by absence of data, which are not.

For beginners, that’s really enough.  Remember, the way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time!

We’ve prepared a little document (AWSTATS.pdf) that walks our customers through AW Stats and we’re always willing to walk you through them face to face, or get a schedule going to analyze them for you and report on what’s relevant, given your marketing plan. We have a number of clients set up to use Google Analytics as well, which not only serves as a good cross-check of information, it takes the interpretive part of statistics and goes to town.   Besides that, there are great graphs and other images.

Whichever way you decide to eat the elephant, don’t be afraid to take that first bite!   Honestly, it takes less time each month than you spent reading this blog post to make an impact on your site’s success.