WEB SITE TRAFFIC REPORTING WITH AWSTATS

Successful Web Marketing Is Based On Detailed Traffic Reports

To an Internet professional a web site is just a marketing tool. It is a means to an end and the end is sales of a company. To successfully market a company on the Web you need to know how that site is doing on a daily basis. All online activity is measured against site performance. To measure that accurately you need a good statistical package like the one we offer at Internet Man. Here is the top page of our stats package. We use the system referred to in most Web Marketing books: Awstats.

A web site is one of five components that make up a successful online business. We create web sites but that is not our primary goal. Our primary goal is building Internet businesses. That is a much larger statement of work. We build Internet businesses by following the model shown. This is how a web site really works:

First Marketing Effort

Step 1 - Build and deploy a web site
Step 2 - Monitor its traffic using Site Statistics (for example, visitors per day)
Step 3 - Place advertising (online and offline) to bring people to the site

Subsequent Marketing Effort:

Step 4 - Monitor site traffic to verify the effectiveness of your advertising
Step 5- Modify your advertising based on statistics - the empirical evidence.
Go back to Step 2.

Each time you go around your site (and your business) gets stronger and more effective. Nothing goes unmeasured. Future Web marketing is based on evidence, not guesswork. To do this effectively you need stats that update nightly. Here is an example of the stats offered Internet Man. See how you get a traffic total for each day.

Non-web savvy people focus exclusively on the web site itself. Focus on web design entirely without thinking about how the web site fits into a overall business plan will not lead to Internet success. Internet success requires immediate feedback on all the steps taken (directory listings, optimization, paid advertising, and offline advertising) to measure the effectiveness of the campaign.

The stats offered by Internet Man have three important functions:

1. They let you know the LAST web page visited BEFORE they came to your site. This lets you know what link people clicked on to find you. This is valuable marketing information.

2. They let you know what search engine people came from AND what search phrase they used at that search engine to find you. This information has immediate impact on your marketing campaign both optimizing the site for those terms and/or buying those terms through an Adword program.

3. They let you know the keywords people are using at search engines to find you. Now your marketing becomes a process of enhancing your pages for those already effective words.

Many web hosting services of little in the way of useful Web marketing reports. The theory is that if you can design a great enough web site the rest of it will take care of itself. We are a WEB MARKETING company. We know that nothing could be further from the truth. We believe that you should know EXACTLY what your site is doing every day. That is why we offer superior Web statistics.

A Web site without traffic, no matter how great, is just signpost in the woods. Internet Man does not like signposts in the woods. If you're like us (a believer in big traffic to a web site) find a hosting service that offer top-notch traffic statistics (like us).