Ask this of most people and you’ll get an automatic response of “fine”, “great”, or “I don’t know, that’s not my job.” While these responses are fine at a networking meeting or other social function, how your website performs can be vital to your company’s success.

So how can you find out exactly how it’s doing? One word - statistics!

You need to look at your site’s statistics (stats), see how they’re doing month-to-month, and then judge your website’s performance. And when you do, if your site isn’t performing, do something about it!

Where do you find your stats, what are they good for and what do they mean?

In last months article, “What have we done for you lately?” I mentioned web stats. For the next few issues I’m going to talk about them in depth.

Let’s start with a quick definition. When I say, “stats,” I mean the reports generated by most ISPs (hosts) of the activity generated by your website. These include such facts as:

• Number of unique visitors to the site
• How they found you (which search engine or other site they came from)
• What search terms they used to find you
• What pages on your site they visited
• How long they spent on the site
• What page they left the site from

A lot of the data found in these reports is very valuable, if you can read it and know what to do with it. So let’s get started by telling you where to look.

Each ISP, or hosting company, is different. Some put the report under www.yourdomainname.com/admin, some use www.yourdomainname.com/stats, still others make you logon to their site and find it in their support pages. When you first signed up they probably sent you an e-mail that explained their system and gave you your username and password to get in to the reports. If you don’t still have the information, the how-to data is usually available on the host’s website, or from their tech support personnel. CityCenter Co. clients can call us for help and to get their username and password.

Now that you know where to find your stats you need to learn which to look at, what they mean, and how you can use them to make your site work harder for you.

In the next issue I’ll give you some basic definitions of the terms you’ll be coming across and discuss the “Unique Visitors” and “Referring Websites” stats.

In the mean time, start looking at your stats. Bookmark the URL and get an idea of what is there. It’s your first step on really understanding stats and making them part of your web tools.

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