Getting Better Web Site Statistics

December 8, 2006 | By Terry Stockdale | In Adsense, Advertising, Monetizing Your Site, PHP Scripting, Web Hosting, Yahoo Publisher Network 

One of the most important things to do, after you get your site initially up and going, is to watch your web statistics.

You want to know which web pages are getting visitors, which sites are referring others to you, which search engines are referring people to your site, what search terms they used to find you, and a lot more.

There are some good statistics packages that most web hosts offer, including Awstats and Webalizer. Powweb, the hosting company that I use, installs Awstats for free.

Those are pretty good for high-level statistics for everyday sites. But, they don’t let you dig deeply enough into the statistics, at least the way the web hosting companies usually set them up.
But, if you’re using Adsense or Yahoo Publisher Network pay-per-click ads on your site, you will want a lot more.

How about an easy view of multiple domains’ activity, multiple web pages activity, all the search keywords that people used to get to your site, how many Google or YPN ads they saw, and how many they clicked on!

Yeah, Google’s and Yahoo’s tracking systems will tell you that — if you want to spend that much time setting up all the specific tracking (and if you don’t have too many different URLs or “channels” you want to track.

Adsense Gold is the tool that I use multiple times a day to monitor my site. It’s a lot easier than going to Google and YPN, plus a lot more information. It has real-time updating, since it’s storing data in a MySQL database on your site and served from your site.

It’s the best tool I’ve found to tell me which of my pages are getting the visits — and how visitors are responding to the Google and YPN ads on the page. That way, I know where I need to focus my redesign, rewriting, etc. efforts.

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