The most important info for your business, or stats 101
 

I just wrote a rant about stats in an email to someone and that reminded
me that jthere are a lot of webmasters who never learned or have forgotten
the importance of basic web server stats, so I'm reposting it here in the hopes
that it is helpful to someone.

Those stats should also tell you how many hits you got
to the front page, how many to any preview or sample pages,
and how many to the join page. That information is perhaps
the most important information there is for your business, in my
opinion. The web business is all about getting traffic to your
site, getting them interested via the sample or tour pages,
then getting them to head to the join page to buy. Therefore
if you haven't looked at your stats before you'll want to really
take a good look at where your traffic is coming from and
how you can get more traffic from those sources, where you are
failing to get traffic from (like if you aren't getting any
hits from Google you know you have some work to do), and
then what those vistors to your site do once they get there.
Are your sample pages getting almost as many hits as your
front page, or are people seeing only the front page and
leaving without even seeing your sales pitch? If so, why?
Perhaps your front page only works in some browser MS
put out 4 years ago called IE6, so you are losing 25% of
your potential customers just because your page won't work
with a modern browser? Perhaps it requires proprietary
software such as Flash? Then is the join page getting
almost as many hits as any one of the sample / tour pages?
If not, why not? Are people leaving your site when the
sample page is only halfway done loading because the page
is a half a MB, taking 100 seconds to load for the majority
of potential customers, who are still using dial up?

thanks for the info

thanks for the info captain obvious ;)

Nah just kiddin', good post, but any webmaster who is not already at least this in-tune with their stats is hurtin'. Stats 101 was a good title for it, I'm sure it'll help someone out.

-P

great post, many people miss a few of those steps.

too hard to read :-/