When viewing site statistics, what items are important? Also, to evaluate the site statistics provided by a web host…what are the key points to have? How can I put this information to good use? Thanks.
@russellDec 23.2004 — #well, what is most important is pretty subjective. the 500 errors are pretty important. it's nice to know where errors are occurring, that (1) you don't catch yourself and (2) no one tells you about.
depending on your business, it may be extrememly important to know what sites are referring traffic. this is particularly true if you are paying for any type of online advertising. it is also nice to see if a lot of users are coming from the major search engines.
it's worthwhile to occasionally look at the user-agent. what bots are indexing your site? what browsers are your visitors using? any malicious behavior occurring?
you can see what pages are hit the most. maybe you have a page that you really want out there in the public eye that hardly has any hits -- need to put more visible linkage to it.
also, if you are in a niche business, it'd be nice to see what domains visitors are coming from. for example, if you cater to students, is a significant portion of your traffic coming from .edu domains?
@rhsundergroundDec 23.2004 — #bandwidth is something to keep your eye on - if you go over, there could be some penalties. also, one of, if not the most important error message is the 404 - Page Not Found. that means that either somebody typed an address incorrectly, or, even worse, you've got a bad link. i don't know what you use to keep track of your statistics, but in [URL=http://awstats.sourceforge.net/]AWStats[/URL] the 404 errors are displayed with the referring page (if there is one). if you can pinpoint where that bad link is coming from, you should change it immediately. another thing to keep notice of is what sites are referring yours, in case you change something about your site that would affect their links.
edit : i suppose i am restating some of russell's thoughts. must be good ones :p
@philawebDec 23.2004 — #First of all it's important to use a good and stable statistics program. I'm using several webhosts and they've all got [URL=http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/]Webalizer[/URL] installed. To check for eventual errors I'm always browsing the log file with an ordinary text editor to see the exact details.
I've recently discovered a PHP based statistics program by [URL=http://slettes.dk/redirect_to/?url_name=http://www.bbclone.de/]BBClone[/URL]. It's very configurable and has lots of interesting information Webalizer doesn't provide, like browser types and operating systems.
When browsing the log files I'm mainly looking for 404 errors. I'm always patching up gone URL's from my domains with a Redirect 410 (Unix server). Gone URL's with file extensions other than markup documents (like .JPG, .GIF etc.) are redirected either to an image file asking the referring website to remove the link or to an "empty" image showing nothing (to replace the pizzabox). Error 410 is the best way to get gone URL's removed from search engines.
@palmertiresauthorDec 23.2004 — #I currently am using my earthlink webspace for my site...once I have a better site, get things working properly, etc. I will move it to a different location (not ready to start paying...still learning) So, right now the site statistics offered by earthlink are pretty basic unless I want to pay extra (which I don't). I briefly looked at the links to The Webalizer and AWStats...can I use these? How? I think at this point I want something pretty basic (mostly because I am not sure what I am looking at, yet), but will progressively want to have more to consider (so a program that has complexity isn't a bad thing...just maybe some flexibility). Thanks for the repsonses.