Why You Ought to See Your Web STATS
The first few web sites I had when I came online and tried to learn how to market my novel, were free sites. They don’t come with access to web STATS, but it didn’t matter to me. I didn’t even know what that was.
Might be just as well, for I had my hands full learning how to make web pages, and add backgrounds, and change font size and colour. Problem was, when I thought they were ready for the public to see, I had no way of knowing if anybody was visiting them at all. Besides me, of course.
Then I began to sign up for free ezines, and checked out links and advice in them. I learned about people who poured over their STATS and based on ups and downs in the number of visitors to even just one page, would tweak that page to make it draw better results, including sales.
Finally I won a free domain registration and hosting for a year on ABC Host. It was during that time I discovered I could check STATS and I could see lots of details.
It took me a while of poking around and clicking on various links to see the graphs and numbers, but gradually I caught on.
Now I have several domain sites, and nurse some for others, and it becomes a bit of a production to go around and check all the STATS once a month. (Hey, I could be doing it daily, if I had the time).
STATS show things like how many hits a web page gets, per day, per hour, even per minute. But hits is not as reliable a gauge of success because every image and font change, including the background, counts as a hit as well as the basic text of that
page.
STATS show how many individual, unique visitors showed up, and how many pages they visited before they clicked off somewhere else. The longer, I discovered, that a visitor lingers on my site and clicks on to another of my pages, the more likely they are to like what they are reading! These are my favourite STATS numbers.
STATS also show how many user sessions have happened, in any of those same time blocks. If this number is higher than the number of unique visitors, it means I have new friends (whether I know their names yet or not), who are coming back more than once to visit my site. That’s good! Very good!
STATS show me which pages are getting the most hits or visits. I must be doing something right there. Maybe I should add a feedback form to the page so I can hear from the people who come to it. Might as well turn them into friends, right? That’s what happened with the page on which I just had the words to my favourite old gospel song, In the Garden.
STATS show me which search engines have been referring visitors to me, and exactly what keyword or phrase they were searching for. If I see a lot are searching for a certain word, I know that it would be a good idea to write more web pages using that keyword or phrase. It will draw more visitors.
STATS show me how long visitors are staying on my site. 0-30 seconds, 30 sec - 1 minute, and on down to 15-30 minutes, and 30 min. to an hour, and those staying an hour +.
When I check my STATS at the beginning of the month, and jot my key numbers into a hand-drawn chart in my black binder, I always get especially excited when I see that last month 7 people stayed on my site for more than an hour. Wow! Those people read for a while!
I ask myself, let’s see, have I heard from 7 new people in the last few weeks?
Sometimes when I’m corresponding by email with a friend, and mention something on my site, they’ll reply, “Oh yes, I saw that when I was browsing there the other day.” I always beam. Yes! This person has taken time to get to know me better!
I still have more to learn to use all the information in my STATS to best advantage, but I think I grasp their value.
How about you? Do you have access to your STATS? Do you know their value? This could be crucial to more people discovering your site.
