Traffic Analysis Primer
Other Statistic Uses
There is other information you can gather from your statistics other than what has been mentioned so far, this information is usually useful when attempting to get advertising or reassessing your promotional efforts.
Demographics
Your server stats can provide limited demographic information helpful both in designing your site and getting advertisers. For instance by looking at operating system or user agent you can tell whether your visitors use a PC or a Mac, use Internet Explorer or Netscape. Some software can give you geographic statistics by resolving the IP address of the people visiting you. While these statistics are not the greatest since it isn't always possible to track down someone's country of origin, this information can still be valuable when presenting a package to advertisers, or even when deciding if you should add content in a second language.
Search Engine Statistics
In addition to daily glancing over your referrers to see if you are maintaining your positions you can occasionally do more detailed analysis and compare the amount of traffic you get from various search engines. This can let you know if there is an engine you need to work on because it does not bring in very much traffic (note it could be because the engine itself is not as popular).
Visitor Behavior
You can occasionally analyze visitor behavior as well. For instance you can look at on which pages people enter your site and on which pages people leave your site. This can tell you what portions of your site are the most popular, and which ones you need to work on. If your site spans multiple topics this can also tell you what most of your visitors are interested in. For instance if you review Mac and PC hardware and most of your visitors are reading the Mac reviews then you could focus more on the Mac section and phase out the PC one (or make it a separate site), you could also pass this information along to advertisers. If you run a community based site this can also tell you how many lurkers you may have, and if you run an article based site this can tell you which articles/authors are the most popular.
Traffic Patterns Over Time
Another use for your stats is to measure traffic patterns over time. This will let you know when most people are visiting your site. The benefits of knowing this can give you some information on your audience. For instance I noticed that with my educational site traffic is tied closely to the school year, so on weekends, holidays, and in the summer my traffic drops. The benefit of knowing this is that I was then able to target my advertising to students. Knowing when people visit your site can often tell you why they visit your site. Another benefit of knowing when you get your most traffic is that you can schedule needed downtime for upgrades around the high usage hours.
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