This page will cover obtaining and using the following website tracking features:

• Traffic stats
• Referral Stats
• Traffic Logs
• 404 Error Reports

These features are available from most full featured web hosts. We use iPowerWeb, and are very pleased with the comprehensive reporting that comes as part of our $10 per month service - they include AWStats, as do most hosts who use CPanel. If you do not have them through your web host, you can purchase them separately, or sign up for a free counter service. Good stats though, go far beyond just knowing how many people are coming into your site, they will include what they do when they get there, how long they stay, and where they came in from.

Traffic stats can tell you the following:

How many people are visiting your domain each month. This number is the biggie for qualifying for participation in some kinds of online promotional programs, and it is nice to watch the numbers change. This number is a fast reference to know whether or not your overall marketing strategy is working or not.

How many people are visiting each page in your domain each month. This lets you know which pages are the most popular. If you know that, then you know what to do more of.

How long the visitors are staying. Some visitors are more valuable than others. If the majority of your traffic is staying less than 30 seconds, then you know that they are not finding what they want. If a significant portion of your visitors are hanging around a while, then you are getting through to them.

How many people are entering on each page. The page that someone enters the site on is an indicator of page effectiveness and interest. They may be bookmarking it, or they may be searching for those terms. Either way, pages that have high entrance levels are ones that are working well, and can give you clues as to how to improve your other pages.

Referral Stats tell you where the person came to your site from. This helps you in the following ways:

It can help you know which ads are effective and which are not. If you are paying for an ad, you should see a significant number of referral hits from that source. If you pay for Google Ads, then the number of hits from Google should dramatically increase over when you were NOT paying for them. If it does not, then your payments are not effective.

Referral stats can also help you to be able to know which types of link exchanges or traffic generation programs are working and which are not also. This takes a bit of analysis on your part, but you will be able to tell if link exchanges with info sites are more effective than link exchanges with stores, for example.

Traffic Logs keep track of every visitor to your site, and where they went.

A traffic log is generally useless, as it just reports every access to your site, and records the IP address (originating server number) of where the visitor is submitting the request from. This feature isn't terribly useful to the average site owner except in one instance:

If you have a Guestbook, Classified listing, BLOG, Discussion Forum, or other page on which visitors can post comments, then you will need to know how to access your traffic logs. There are people online who go around looking for places to put their SPAM, or to just post offensive or stupid comments. They get some sort of thrill out of it. We had someone Spamming our guestbook with porn, scams, and other offensive posts. Someone else would just post gibberish, who knows why! I was able to use the traffic logs to review who had last accessed the Guestbook Post function, and isolate their IP address. I then went into my server settings and banned them from access. There are limits to how effective this can be in the face of someone who is really determined, but most of the trolls out there are opportunists, so IP banning can be highly effective most of the time. A traffic log is the key to knowing who to ban when problems occur!

404 Error Logs tell you which pages someone tried to access but got a "page not found" message instead of the page they requested. 404 logs will also track images that did not display.

This kind of tracking can really help you in maintaining your website. If you check your 404 logs at the end of each month, you'll eventually end up eliminating all the errors that you can control. Good 404 reporting will tell you both the referral page (if it is in your site), and the URL of the page that did not display. That means you can see rapidly whether one of your pages is at fault or not. If you delete a page from your site, it will take MONTHS for the log to stop recording hits to that URL, because all the search engines that indexed the page will keep spidering it (using a robot to catalog your site) until they have all removed it from their listings. Some only spider every six months. So don't worry about the pages that show up here that you cannot control, focus on cleaning up the errors that you can control.

Good site stats and logs can help you to keep your site functioning cleanly, as well as to more tightly focus your content, and to run effective marketing. They are worth paying a small amount for, or worth upgrading to a better server for if the server offers them with the package. Used right, they can help you to take your site from obscurity to visibility.