Stick your hand up if you review website traffic logs everyday. Yep, me too. It’s an addiction only surpassed by that “send & receive” button on my email client. That button is clicked many times a day, sometimes multiple times an hour…ahh, it’s like a drug hit when you download a new email. Anyway, I digress, this is a topic about webstats not email.
Traffic logs are important metrics which help you to determine how popular a site is, where your visitors are coming from, why you might get traffic spikes, whether search engine spiders are indexing your content, what keywords visitors are using to find your site, etc etc. All great stuff and very interesting for web business purposes. The problem is when you become addicted to making those numbers increase, especially early when you first launch your new baby.
I know the feeling of desperately trying to push those little numbers higher and higher, making your unique visitor figures reach double figures, then triple, then quadruple per day (if you are lucky!). Worse still this process is never quick unless you are A) Famous B) Pull off some great PR stunt or C) Have friends in high places. For most of us we have to pull our traffic one visitor at a time hopefully convincing each person to come back tomorrow and keep the numbers rising.
Blog Business World: If your traffic flow to your blog is consistent or rising slightly, you are probably keeping your regular readers happy. They are returning and enjoy your posts. If that’s the case for your blog, stop reading your traffic reports for the rest of the week. Try looking at overall trends from week to week or from month to month. That longer term approach removes any day to day fluctuations either up or down.
Not reviewing my traffic stats for a whole week?! Well you might have something there. Certainly BBW has some good advice. Traffic stats should only be taken seriously over longer terms rather than a daily obsession. If your site brings in 10 regular visitor after your first week you are doing well. Make that 50 a day after your first few months. Maybe a few hundred after you hit six months. That is if you stick at it every day, don’t expect even these numbers if you post new content only once a week.
Regardless of the real business implications and long term trends a daily visit to your traffic logs is fun. It’s fun to see which sites are linking to you, when you get a link back from a high profile site or you see that your article marketing campaign is working. It’s interesting to try and explain an explosion in pageviews on a particular day and yet no additional unique visitors to justify it. I like to know how many new podcast downloads occurred and which articles are being read more often. As much as traffic analysing might be frustrating at times, provided you don’t get obsessed with pushing the numbers up at all costs, a daily visit to your logs is all part of the fun of operating a web business.
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Nothing wrong with refreshing your webstats every 15 mins
is there?
*refresh*
oh a new visitor…. .. wait.. don’t leave.. hey HEY!!.. argh!
Other addictions include:
Checking opt-in lists
Checking PPC conversions
Checking split test results
…
…
I gotta get out more
Yaro I have the same bug I check everyday I love it but I need to control the daily checking. Some days I check every few hours.
/me raises hand.
What about checking google adsense reports multiple times a day? *grins*
It appears the illness is spreading…
[…] Yaro Starak recently Blogged about how he is sometimes Obsessing With Traffic Logs and I am not ashamed to admit that I am often obsessed with my Traffic Logs. I just find it so fascinating to see which countries my visitors are coming from (oh the joy when New Zealand fell to the 3rd highest traffic - most of it mine!), Which Web Sites they are linking from, and the Search Queries which people are typing into the Search Engines. […]
I’m not to bad with my Awstats these days, although I do check most sites daily, its my Adsense ad stats that have me hooked, I must check them atleast 12 times a day, like somehow if I keep checking them they might go up quicker
Thank God, I’m not the only person who does this. But I kinda like my addiction… no support group for me.
[…] Web business owners enjoy some of the best tools for assessing the success of their website. In the history of business there has never been a more analysable tool than the website. Webmasters often get caught up with their website statistics, carefully monitoring daily changes (even hourly changes for the sick puppies!). Much of the attention focuses on the number of unique visitors and page views, which are important statistics since they tell you how many humans (or supposed humans) visit your site. Webmasters focus a lot of energy on those numbers that they may forget some of the other important metrics. One of the most important and often forgotten statistics is visit length. […]
[…] SOURCE: Obsessing With Traffic Logs Visitor logs: Don’t worry about them Mining For Gold…In Your Web Traffic Logs Surprises from the Traffic Logs […]
Hey, my habit is a little different. first i see my blog stats and when i see a new visitor. I go and check my adsense reports to see if the person had clicked or not.
funny, isnt it.
bye,
faraz
author of Self Improvement & Spirituality Blog
I think everyone has fallen into this drug like addiction that lures you in to your stats. You could be a mile away watching tv or something, and think in your head “I wonder how many hits I got today. What if I got 3000 by a popularity of one of my blogs? That could mean hundreds of dollars for me!”
I really think that addiction will always be there.
Cheers,
Mike
a href=”http://buildthatlist.blogspot.com” title=”Build That List”>Build That List
From all mentioned above, I really think that analyzing the keywords people are using to get to your site is the most important data that the logs store. Also note that it can be driven which words are NOT used to find your site, which might be important too.