Web stats are statistics that show you the behavioral patterns and activities of visitors to your site. The following is a list of some of the more common web stat parameters:



1. How the visitors get to your site (i.e., referral URL) 2. Which pages they visit on your site 3. How long they stay on your site 4. How many unique visits to your website 5. How many times a person visits (revisits) your site 6. How many people bookmark your website 7. Which countries your website visitors hail from 8. The keywords or phrases used to locate your site 9. How many visitors your site gets per day or per month 10. Traffic volume to your site broken down per hour/per day 11. How much traffic each search engine refers.

As you can imagine having access to the above parameters is a very powerful marketing tool indeed. That said, understanding the theory is all good and well, but knowing the real life application as concerns your online business is the end goal, right?

INTERPRETING WEB STATS

If you know how your visitors get to your site then you are in a good position to fine tune your promotional campaigns. Think about it a moment, let's say you are spending $$$ amount on various advertising campaigns, unless you know precisely which campaign is producing what results you cannot possibly know which campaigns are effective and which ones are duds!

In other words by being able to track where your internet traffic comes from, you can focus on those areas that are working and stop wasting time and resources on those that aren't.

Consider the issue of keywords; let's assume that you are optimizing your web site for a number of targeted keywords wouldn't it be much better if you knew which keywords words were effective and which ones weren't?

For example you might be under the misimpression that a very popular, much searched for keyword you'd spent a lot of time and effort optimizing for, is responsible for sending most of the traffic to your site.

But what if your site actually ranks poorly for that keyword, and that really you are getting next to no traffic from it at all and that in fact your traffic was coming from a far less popular keyword. You'd never be aware of this unless you had web stats at your disposal!

Good web stat scripts also inform you which search engine is sending you what amount of traffic. Imagine a scenario where you spend a significant amount of time optimizing your website for a particular search engine because you are under the impression that so-and-so search engine is responsible for sending you the greater portion of your traffic.

But what if you're wrong!

What if in fact it is another search engine altogether that is sending all that traffic to your site, you'd be none the wiser unless you had web stats to apprise you of the situation.

HOW WEB STATS CAN IMPROVE YOUR SEO

The most profitable websites on the internet are the ones that have the most traffic. The reason why they have the most traffic is because they are extremely popular. And guess what? Those sites are popular because they are evidently giving their visitors something they find useful. Useful enough that they keep returning, even bookmark the site, and spend a significant length of time perusing it.

The more time people spend on your web site the stickier your site or blog is said to be. The stickier a site is the better because not only does that register well with the search engines it means that you are offering something valuable to your visitors (e.g., useful info.). As far as seo strategies go, a stickier site is more likely to advance up the SERPs (search engine results pages) as well as more likely to get promoted page-rank wise.

Most web stat scripts can notify you of the sticky status of your site by supplying you with data showing how much time people spend on your site as well as how many of them bookmark your site (add to favorites).

Another added incentive to having a sticky site is that all that useful information translates into increased credibility, expertise and trust for you from your visitors, which ultimately makes it easier for you to get them to execute your most desired action on your site, be it to purchase something, sign up or fill out a form.

MONETIZING MISDIRECTED HITS

Sometimes when someone clicks on a link within your website or an external link pointing to your site they do not land on the requested web page but instead are directed to an error page or what is commonly referred to as a 404 page. Web stats are able to tell you how many times this happens. If it happens often enough why not customize your error pages with a message, one-time-offers or at least something that enables you to profit from those otherwise lost hits.

In summation, this article has barely scratched the surface of how useful web stats are. If however you're currently operating your internet business without them and you wish to remedy the situation, you can get premium quality free web stat scripts from:

1. http://awstats.sourceforge.net

2. www.statcounter.com