Christian Little

Tonight I’m covering a very important topic – checking your web stats occasionally. There’s several types of webmasters in this world, including:

• Webmasters that don’t put analytics tracking on their sites, either out of stupidity or just lack of knowledge.
• Webmasters that put analytics tracking on their sites just for the sake of saying so.
• Webmasters that put analytics tracking on their sites and actually use it.

If you fall into either of the first two categories, you should be dragged out into the street and shot.

At any given time, you should have a rough idea of what kind of traffic your website gets, and analytics programs are there to help you. Heck, most hosting companies these days will give you Awstats, Webalizer, and sometimes Analog Stats automatically – you just have to get into the habit of checking them. Or you can take the 15 minutes and put in a more powerful solution like Google Analytics.

So do you know the stats on your websites? You sure? How many visitors do you get each month? How many page views? These are just the start, and you should be able to answer them without even thinking.

But there is another reason for knowing this information – surges. A surge is what happens when your site gets a massive influx of traffic for no apparent reason (this is also called the “Digg Effect” – as getting on the first page of Digg.com tends to get you an insane amount of traffic instantly).

Here’s an example of a surge in traffic – I noticed this when looking at the stats for this blog:

It turns out that yesterday somebody sent a huge volume of traffic to this site, enough to tip the scale to the specific time they did it. Now I’m not going to give specifics about the amount of traffic, but this site averages about 2,500 unique visits/month without surges – so causing a shift like you see in the above chart is no small beans.

With 30 seconds of reviewing my analytics programs, I was able to quickly identify what happened – a single website was the source, and when I went to it I discovered it was some experimental blog search program, so I’m guessing it was their bot or they were testing something and just used my site as a guinea pig (lucky me).

But let’s think about this for a moment – in reality if a website suddenly sends you a surge of traffic you want to encourage that behavior (assuming it’s real visitors, not bot traffic). So the point I’m trying to get at today is this: if a website suddenly sends you a large surge of traffic, investigate why. If it turns out they blogged about your or something and it generated that much traffic, then contact them and see if you can get them to do it on a regular basis or buy advertising space on their site. It’s a really great way of identifying quality traffic sources if you keep a close eye on things.

Now I’m not saying you should watch your stats like a hawk – I check mine every 2-3 days usually and that’s enough frequency to keep an eye out for surges like this. If you site gets little traffic, then even just checking weekly will do – but get into the habit of doing it. When you get a large volume of traffic on a regular basis, you need to keep very close attention on the stats (daily, sometimes hourly if it’s a very very popular site).

Why you ask? Aside from the above, consider the following situation – you have a website that gets 10,000+ visits per day (about 300,000 per month). Suppose you login to your stats this morning and see the traffic is now averaging only 1,000 uniques daily for the past few days – you’ve just lost 90% of your traffic! Granted that big of a shift is rare, but it does happen (i.e. if you get banned from Google).

Worse still if it’s not your website…suppose it happens to your employer’s website – you know, the nice guy who signs your paychecks? Guess what, if you haven’t been checking the stats on their website that you are responsible for, then you aren’t doing your job and you won’t have a job very soon.

But let’s assume it’s your own website for another moment. Review my posting earlier this week about figuring out the value of your website visitors, let’s say you’ve worked out that your visitors are worth $2 each. And you’ve suddenly gone from 10,000 visitors daily to 1,000 – worse still it took you 2 days to check the stats! While you were expecting $20,000 in revenue for those two days, you suddenly find yourself at $2,000! Just imagine the stress, panic, and heart ache this will cause you.

So let’s say the mantra together everybody: Statistics are our friend.