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Web statistics is an important feature to determine the success and future of your website. Web statistics gives you an idea of how many visitors your website is attracting and what they think about your website. Web host companies offer this feature in the form of web statistics, an essential tool to assess your website traffic.

Log files contain useful information about the origin of the visitor (their IP address), the type of browser they were using, which pages they viewed, how long they stayed at your website, whether or not they arrived from a search engine and if so, what keywords they used to locate your site and other consumer behaviors.

All this is stored in raw log files and it is not easy to interpret the information stored in this as most of the information is stored in coded words. In order to decode the information and make it comprehensible, a statistics program is used for the same. The statistics programs take the raw server logs, analyze and break down the information into readable data.

Many web hosting companies do offer this feature of stats program within the hosting package. This feature is often accessed from the control panel of your hosting account. Some of the popular web stat programs are AWStats, Analog, and WebAlizer. All three of these programs are free.

The stats programs also help in creating a systematic division of useful data such as ‘unique visitors’, ‘number of hits’, and ‘number of pages’ in the form of a data summary accessible from the control panel.

Although not all information proves to be significant for the website owner, it does give you a brief idea of how your website is doing. The number of hits, for example tells you how many times a request for any individual part of your site including graphics, script files and any other files that are part of a page were made.

The number of page views determines exactly which pages are doing well and are popular among the visitors. Once you find that out, it is recommended that you link the popular pages to other websites in order to promote them further. Moreover, you can even eliminate the pages that are unpopular or perhaps even modify them in a bid to attract more traffic.

Visitors will not always arrive at your website through your homepage. If they have arrived at your website through a search engine, they could perhaps even arrive at popular entry or exit pages. Hence it is important that you make the popular entry pages and exit pages more attractive and informational. This would lead to the possibility of the visitor of either book marking your page for future reference.

Referring sites will give you useful information regarding consumer patterns and where they are coming from. In case they arrived at your website through a search engine, then you will know what exact keywords were used to find your website. This will further help you to optimize your website and fine tune and modify your keywords in order to maintain consistent website traffic.

A third-party service can also help you to monitor your website. These services can range from a basic ‘counter” facility to more detailed and comprehensive information regarding your website traffic.

For a more analytical report and comprehensive information regarding your website visitors, stats services can offer accurate data by breaking down the IP addresses into individual users. This kind of information is useful to determine the quality and quantity of traffic that your website attracts. This will further help you to either modify or eliminate certain features or keywords in order to attract targeted and specific traffic.

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