Have you ever wondered how many people visited your web site on a particular day?  Analyzing your web logs is an important part of proper and effective marketing on the Internet.

If you are running a web site that has hundreds of pages, a simple counter on your index page will not capture the true number of visitors.  In fact, a simple counter doesn't tell you anything.

Most web hosters will provide you with a log file for your web site that will capture all the information that you need.

But, you will need to run a script on your web site to read and interpret these log files.  Some of the more popular scripts available are:

Analog
http://www.statslab.cam.ac.uk/~sret1/analog/

RobLog
http://www.robplanet.com/cgi/roblog/

Webalizer
http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/

What type of information is important?

Well of course the most important statistics is how many visitors you are receiving.  Without visitors, you will not make any sales!

Log files store a variety of information such as:

* Daily Hits
* Hourly Hits
* Monthly Hits
* Entry Pages
* Exit Pages
* Referral Sites
* Most accessed documents
* Referring countries
* etc...

Stats tracking also comes in handy for ad tracking.  For example, if you run a classified ad in an ezine, you can code your ad as follows:

http://www.freecoolcash.com/?ad1

You can then view your log files to see how many times a visitor came through that URL.  This will save you money from having to use an external tracking service.

Having statistics on the web pages that your visitors exit your site from the most will tell you which pages need to be improved.  By improving these pages, you will help keep the visitor interested in continuing to surf your site.

Stat programs can also tell you how many page views your site displays on a given day.  For example, you may have 3,000 page views and 1,000 visitors.  This means that on average, each visitor viewed three pages.  If this ratio starts to drop, this means that visitors are not sticking around your site as long as they used to be.  This is when you need to go back to drawing board and try to make your site more "sticky."

To conclude, stats analysis will give you an idea on how you can fine-tune your web site and marketing strategy.  Not keeping track of your web statistics is like running a business without accounting records.  You will not know how well or bad you are doing until it may be too late.
 

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Gauher Chaudhry is editor of Cool Cash Ezine.  You can subscribe
by sending an email to subscribe@freecoolcash.com with "sub-art"
in the subject.  Join Gauher's two-tier affiliate program by
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teaches individuals how to make thousands of dollars in
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