Statistics

Finding out about the who, what, where, and how about your visitors is an extremely useful tool for getting an idea of your user base, particularly for commercial sites. This information can be obtained by server logs or site tagging and interpreted by web stats programs:

• Who - By using geolocation you can find the location of someone via their IP address.
• What - What pages did the surfer view on your web site?
• Where - Was the surfer referred from another site? Did they find you via a search engine, and what terms did they search on? Do they have your site bookmarked?
• How - How long was the surfer on your site?

This information and much more can be provided to you without your visitor even knowing, i.e. no cookies need to be placed onto the visitor's computer to gather this data. With a decent statistics program you will be able to find out how many people have bookmarked your site, how long the average visit is, and what are your site's most popular pages.

Simple statistics programs are often bundled with your web hosting package, and if you have access to raw log files, you can download them and anaylse them on your local machine via a program such as Webtrends.