Your website's web stats are your very own treasure chest of information.

Make sure your hosting company provides you with webstats free of charge ... part 1

The importance of knowing your own web stats

I have a quick question for anyone who has a website. I call it the first acid test and its often a question that we know we should be asking but we dont because were scared of what the answer really means 

Yet it is of such fundamental importance that I quite often get scared as to what is happening in the South African Internet space. 

Its simply this: how many visitors does your web site receive and where do they come from? 

The facts of the matter are that you should know instantly, continuously and accurately at any moment in time. If you have to ask someone to find out for you, you have no business running a website and short of contributing to your ISPs bottom line you are achieving nothing with your online presence.

 Its painful but its true. I went through the same thing myself ignorance is bliss. My website costs me R250 a month and perhaps, somewhere someone will look at my business card or print ad or street pole ad and visit me. Perhaps.

But in two years it hasnt happened. Worst of all I didnt know it hadnt happened. Web site stats? What web site stats? 

Web site stats are EASY to get. If you have the right stats package available to you and ANY decent web hosting company will use one of the 2 preferred stats packages Awstats  or Webalizer stats and if they dont insist that they give them to you (at no cost) and that they give you continuous access to them or else change your service provider.  

Yet theyre vital. How many of us can measure accurately and by this I mean with good accuracy the success of an ad campaign, or a listing on one of these listing hosting operations? My company forked out R1000 a month to be listed by a popular local listing company with the most pitiful stats e-mailed to me on a monthly basis, listing how many times my category was viewed. Note: NOT the number of times my weblink was even clicked! And in our time on this listing we never received a call, a hit or so much as an e-mail.

Thats expensive advertising! Really expensive advertising. For that kind of money I could have BOUGHT a client from somewhere and at least broken even on the deal.  

Needless to say I felt ripped off. It would be far better for me to have paid on a per visitor basis. Yet this company would never countenance such a scenario they just dont have the traffic to justify their prices and thats the sad sorry truth.

But there is a way to track effectiveness of each and every ad campaign that you run. I can tell you how to establish whether a visitor found your site via a search engine, or a street bill board advert (I can even tell you the city) or a print advert in the July issue of Topcar magazine or whatever campaign you wish to track. It takes virtually no effort on your part and in the next article Ill show you how to start tracking your visitors and where they come from. Itll give you an EXACT measure of every rand youve spent. Show me any other advertising medium that offers you that!