Why Using A Hosting Company That Offers Statistics Can Make You Money!	Visited: 1359 1.0/5.0 (2 votes total) Rate: Select 1 - Terrible 2 - Poor 3 - Average 4 - Good 5 - Outstanding
by Alex Coulstring December 14, 2006

Wouldn’t you for a minute love to be able to follow your online visitors and see where on your website they visit and which page they leave? Just imagine being able to sit down on a chair by them and just WATCH where they go on their computer or better yet, find how they came across your site. Did they find your ad in local newspaper you placed, searched google, yahoo or msn, or was it a link from another website. I don’t know about you, but I think that would be real important information. In fact it is such important information that you could even tweak your own site to be responsive to where your online visitors are going.

What Can You Learn From Statistics

Up until a few years ago when I designed a website, I did just that. I just designed the website then basically tossed it on the Internet. The only way I knew if visitors were coming was either by the emails I received or a silly counter I had installed.

My hosting company then didn’t offer any statistics features so I eventually packed my bags and all 20 of my sites and switched hosting companies. It wasn’t easy but after I got settled in with a good hosting company that offered statistics, it became the best move I ever made!

My current web hosting company offers many statistics online programs but the one that I found was the best and not over whelming was Webalizer. Once you enable Webalizer to run, it watches your website for multiple criteria’s such as how many visits and hits you receive each day. If your not sure about the difference between “visits” and “hits”, visits is measured in how many unique visitors determined by the visitors IP address visits your website. So you could say if you have 1000 “visits” in a month, then you have had 1000 different people visit your site. Hits on the other hand are how many times your site was visited or “hit”. If a single person repeatedly visits your site then it’s considered a hit.

When you first go to Webalizer you will see a graph comparing how my “Pages”, “Files”, and “Hits” you received each month since you started Webalizer. You can see if your site is gaining or loosing traffic per monthly basis. You are also given a “Summary By Month” showing total Hits and Visits and a daily averages. There are also other monthly figures but I won’t get into those as to me they are not as important and this article would be a book long.

Here is where it gets real interesting. When you click on the month, you uncover detailed information about your website including hourly and daily website usage, top URLs within your site, top enter pages, top exit pages, top referrals and so on.

Converting The Information Into Money

Now this is what you’re all wondering about. You might have guessed by now but if you haven’t then let me explain how you can profit from that statistics that now are in front of you. For the sake of this article I will only be focusing on what I believe are the most important pieces of information you can learn from Webalizer. They are Top URLs, Top Entry Pages, Top Exit Pages, and last but certainly not least Top Referrals.

Top URLs

Top URLs is the top pages within your website that people visit. Let’s say you have a Cat and Dog site. Your cat page is cat.html and your dog page is dog.html. Now you login into Webalizer, click the month you want to view, scroll down to Top URLs and you see that there was more “hits” for cat.html than dog.html. You now know that more people are looking up cats than dogs. How can you benefit and make more money with knowing which pages are getting the most traffic? Focus your ad campaigns such as affiliate banners, programs or links, Google Adsense and so on to the popular traffic pages. If you want people to visit the less traffic pages, then you can simply market the less traffic pages with banners, links or a catchy paragraph on the high traffic pages.

Top Entry Pages

Top entry pages are the initial pages people go to when they visit your site. Say we use the same Cat and Dog example and you see that cat.html gets more entry traffic then dog.html. What does this mean? It can mean that there is a direct link to that page from another website. It can also mean a search engine has that page indexed and its being display as search results when someone could be searching for lets say cats. A lot like Top URLs you can benefit from this by focusing your ad campaigns to the top entry pages, thus leading to more sales.

Top Exit Pages

Top exit pages are the last pages a person is on your site before they leave to go somewhere else. Why is this important? Knowing which page ranks highest as an exit page can help you tweak that page to keep a visitor from leaving. You could put a link and a catchy paragraph at the bottom of the page promoting one of your Top URL pages. The main thing is you want to keep the visitor at your site as much as possible and knowing where you can tweak your page to keep that visitor from leaving will lead to more sales.

Top Referrals

Top referrals are where the visitors are coming from. You can see if your visitors are coming from direct request (typing in your domain name), coming from a search engine, and find what other websites have links to yours. This feature can be more a money saver than anything. Lets say you have a monthly paying banner ad at mybestcats.com. Using Top referrals you can see how many people are clicking on that ad and entering your site by looking down the Top referral list and finding that website. If after a few months you see that only a handful of visitors came from mybestcats.com then you can make a more valuable decision to keep the banner or not on their site.

Conclusion

I hope my article has helped you understand the benefits of web statistics and how this information can help you tailor a better website and make you more money. I believe that have the best hosting plan is crucial to website success. If you would like to see what hosting I use that offers Webalizer at no cost for your website and many more important features, please visit Best Hosting Plan Ever.