Most people never bother to look at
statistics program that comes with virtually every website because few realize gold mine of information it contains. Your website statistics hold key for understanding your traffic, improving sales and increasing overall effectiveness of your online selling.
Whether you realize it or not, your website has "critical numbers" that enable you to measure overall success of your Internet presence.
Any serious website operator should understand four most important numbers: Hits; Unique, Targeted Visitors; Leads; Sales.
Hits - Hits are typically page views, whether by same or different visitors, and indicate overall activity on site.
A lot of hits shows activity (usually a good thing), but doesn't necessarily mean you've had a high number of visitors. Search engine "spiders" and surfers hitting their back buttons also up hit count.
Research has shown that, depending on size of your site, ratio of hits to visitors will range anywhere from 2 to 1 all way up to 12 to 1.
Unique, Targeted Visitors - people surfing to your site who have not been there before within a certain period of time.
Depending on statistics program you use, a unique visitor may be someone who hasn't been to your site in a day or a week, while in other programs a visitor remains unique until you reset stats.
You must understand how your stats program classifies unique visitors so you don't mistakenly believe your site is getting 30 unique visitors a day only to find out it is same 30 people coming back day after day!
A "targeted" visitor means that visitor has an interest in what you are selling or promoting, this is usually demonstrated by keyword searches at a search engine or by clicking targeted advertisements.
