Web Design Tools

Your website stats are very important to you. After starting your advertising campaign, you will become almost as interested in your website stats as you are in your e-mail.

But what does all that stuff mean on the stats report?

Good question.

Let's start with definitions:

Total successful requests:
5000 ~ This does not mean that 5000 people visited your page. This means that there were 5000 requests for your page. This includes spiders from search engines, graphics spiders (software that looks for certain graphics), link validators, and actual page views. If your URL is on 100 other people's pages, and they all validate their links on their page....that would raise this number by 100. In other words...this number is useless to you.

Average successful requests per day:
100 ~ This does not mean that you had 100 visitors per day. This number relates to the "total successful requests". The total successful requests number is based on a period of time...perhaps seven days or one month. This number just tells you the average per day in that time period...another useless number.

Total successful requests for pages:
1020 ~ Another useless number that also relates to the "Total Successful Requests".

Average successful requests for pages per day:
50 ~And yet another useless number that just give the daily average of "Total successful requests for pages" above.

Total failed requests:
100 ~This number tells how many times that pages were requested, but the request could not be filled...perhaps the server was busy, or one of your links isn't working. You may need to check on this number.

Number of distinct files requested:

153 ~ Now we are getting to the important part. This number tells you how many of your pages were requested by name. It still isn't much use to you, because of link validators, search engine spiders, etc. But we are getting closer to what matters.

Number of distinct hosts served:

800 ~ This is what matters. This will tell you how many page views you had. How many actual people visited your page. However, if they are
repeat visitors, their number won't be added here...so you should add about 5% to this number for a more accurate count.

Number of new hosts served in last 7 days:

50 ~ This relates to the above listing. It just tells how many actual visitors you've had in the past seven days, whereas the number
above tells how many you have had in a given period of time...perhaps a month.

Total data transferred:

17179 kbytes ~ An unimportant number, this just tells how many kilobytes of information has been transferred, how many kilobytes have been downloaded from your page to another computer in a given period of time.

Average data transferred per day:

529910 bytes ~Also unimportant, this relates to the number above, and just gives the daily average.

Now on to more important things...you now know that the only number that is important to you is "Number of distinct hosts served".

Now, you need to know where these visitors came from, which is why you key your ads.

If you have good stats software or service, the report will include the following:

• Monthly Report

• Weekly Report

• Daily Summary

• Daily Report

• Hourly Summary

• Host Report

• Directory Report

• File Type Report

• Request Report

• Referrer Report

• Browser Summary

• Browser Report

The Monthly, Weekly, Daily, and Hourly reports and summary's just show how you are doing for those time periods, and relate to the first report...listed above.

What you are the most interested in is the "Referrer Report". This is where you can see where your visitors are coming from, if you keyed your ads.

If I keyed my ads like this: http://kwilliams.hypermart.net/?usp, and I saw that same URL in my Referrer report, and it said that there were 600 requests, then I would know that 600 of my visitors went to my site from a URL I placed in this e-book. If I advertised in Marketing News Daily, with this URL: http://kwilliams.hypermart.net/?mnd, and I saw that URL in the Referrer report, with a zero, or 5 beside it or any other really low number, I would know that my ad in Marketing News Daily wasn't doing very well...and I would either change the ad, or advertise elsewhere.

Now you know that only two things matter to you in your stats report: 1) "Number of distinct hosts served", and 2) "Referrer Report". That's all you ever need to worry about in your stats report...the rest doesn't matter.

Now you see why it is important to key your ads. To key an ad, simply use the question mark, as seen above. For instance, http://www.yourdomain.com/?yourkey. You can put whatever
you want behind that question mark...a code that tells you where the person saw your ad...where they came from. It works the same way with e-mail addresses.
yourname@whatever.com?subject=yourkey. The word "subject=" behind the question mark here is required. This pre defines the subject line in the response e-mail.


 

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