One of the best tools for tweaking your website is statistics on page hits. There are lots of free tools that will provide the numbers. (See link at bottom.) A good web counter will help you define your audience, improve site navigation, and help you improve your page text.
A good web counter will tell you:
- when your site gets the most traffic: Knowing which days of the week are busiest will help you decide when to schedule maintenance and upgrades or when to update your product list for the maximum exposure in the shortest amount of time
- how users are navigating your site: You'd expect visitors to come in the front door and follow the links you've so carefully laid out. It rarely works that way. Visitors will find a specific page of interest through a search engine. Other sites will link directly to the page that holds the most interest to their audience. Web counters and stats can help you see where the traffic originates and how users navigate from there. Knowing this, you can plan your navigation links to lead the new viewer to the things they need to see, even if they did sneak in through the side door.
- which kind of links draw attention and which don't: You might be surprised at what viewers click. That wonderful graphic link that you spent hours making might get passed up every time. That last-minute link you included mostly as a way to fill a blank spot might be the hottest link on the site. Knowing what's getting clicked will help you improve your page layout and let you know which subjects or products might be worth expanding.
http://www.thefreesite.com/Webmaster..._and_trackers/
I don't recommend any one over another. If you find one you like especially well, let us know.
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Oh, PLEASE!!!!
Be sure to mention that you're talking about "site stats" and not a "hit counters."
NO ONE should have a hit counter on their website unless it's a personal site!
VERY unprofessional, and totally useless for business purposes.
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Actually, I don't see much of a distinction between "hit counters' and "site stats." They both fulfill the same purpose. It just depends on how in-depth you want to go.
I must disagree with you on them being "VERY unprofessional." I don't know a single commercial website that doesn't use some form of a hit counter--whether it be a simple page hit totals or more involved statistics. I WILL agree, however, that a majority of professional sites use invisible hit counters.
A great many companies find them EXTREMELY useful. They are a benchmark for setting budgets, deciding which areas of the company to expand, and as proof of compliance with government regulations. The emails generated from a website are another marker that companies look at very closely, but that's a whole different subject.
Now, the issue of visible or invisible is a personal preference. There are many commercial websites that do have visible counters. They DO blend in with the tone of the page. You won't find many using big yellow smiley faces or dancing stars for hit counters. That's a matter of personal preference as well...and what goes with your web content. For instance, if your website happens to be about baskets and you choose to use a visible hit counter, there's nothing wrong with using a basket motif in your hit counter graphics.
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I did neglect to mention in the original post that many web hosting companies provide page hit numbers and other stats as a regular service to their customers. They are usually found in the admin section, along with numbers on bandwidth usage and disk space.