Yes, it really happens. Now you might find it hard to believe but you will understand after I explain.

Prior to late 2004, Google undisputedly ruled search engine world. During second half of year things took a dramatic turn when Yahoo and MSN decided to challenge Big G for some of their lucrative market share.

Search engines are a big source of revenue especially when it comes to advertising and for many this is their bread and butter. With emerging prominence of both Yahoo and MSN, advertisers have more channels through which to advertise their goods and services.

What marks Google apart from it’s two big rivals in this area is way they display their ads. They deliver their ads through a system called Adwords which is unobtrusive to viewers. The ads are placed to right to clearly distinguish them from search results. Occasionally they will place ads above SERPS.

Overture is company which handles placement of ads for both Yahoo and MSN. Now if you should search for a popular keyword in either of them, you will notice that ads are above results, to your right and at bottom of page just above Next button. This is where it gets interesting.

Analyzing your web traffic statistics can be an invaluable tool for a number of different reasons. But before you can make full use of this tool, you need to understand how to interpret data.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with basic web traffic information that you then have to interpret and make pertinent use of. However, data you receive from your host company can be overwhelming if you don't understand how to apply it to your particular business and website. Let's start by examining most basic data - average visitors to your site on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis.

These figures are most accurate measure of your website's activity. It would appear on surface that more traffic you see recorded, better you can assume your website is doing, but this is an inaccurate perception. You must also look at behavior of your visitors once they come to your website to accurately gauge effectiveness of your site.

There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means number of information requests received by server. If you think about fact that a hit can simply equate to number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic.

The more visitors that come to your website, more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater traffic is to your website, more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior. The smaller number of visitors, more a few anomalous visitors can distort analysis.

The aim is to use web traffic statistics to figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. One way to determine this is to find out how long on average your visitors spend on your site. If time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates an underlying problem. Then challenge is to figure out what that problem is.