Stats are everything in our business, so its always important to have as much information about how our business(es) are doing.
I currently use AWStats, and some Google Analytics. Personally I don’t trust Google to let them keep their hands on my vital signs to decide if it qualifies for the Furor’s brand of success, so they get limited access to some sites and services.
Every monthly I keep a Excel file with the month’s number of unique visitors, total number of visits (Not pages, or hits), as well as a calculation of how visitors are reacting to my sites. By having just those 3 data points you’re going to be able to create a graph that’s going to tell you if your marketing is paying off or not.
In the graph below you will be looking at boogybonbon’s traffic since the first month is was launched all the way up to last month.
You will also be able to see the number of unique visitors, number of visits and the visitor interest levels.

In the graph you will notice that boogybonbon only gets around 7,000 uniques each month, however the users are 7x more interested in the content. This may look good, but there are some problems in the fact that the site is not gaining new customers as quickly as it should, which is a problem.
The next graph is of a friend’s site which will stay unnamed.

As you can see over the last two years his site has rocketed to almost 17,000 unique visitors each month, and within the next 2 years he should be looking at more than 40,000 unique visitors.
The only problem is that the visitor interest levels are low. This means that his users are hardly coming back to the site, and not moving around his site that much when they are their, so he probably has a high bounce rate.
Both of these sites show their weak points through the graphs, and allow us to see what we need to do to be able to grow our visitor’s interest in our products.
Now its your turn to run the numbers on your websites. What you will need to do is open Excel and enter in each’s months date, total number of uniques, total visits, then enter in the sum formula “=SUM(C1-B1)” to take the total uniques and subtract them from the total visits for each month.

This will give you the yellow line in the graph, and show you how your users are reacting to your website, marketing, etc.
Enjoy!


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