Ok, your site is up, all the functions work and your business seems to be going. Why caring about statistics and graphs and boring things like that?

For professional (search) marketers the answer is clear. It is useful information which is a necessary tool for your search strategy. For them, they better use a more advanced research tool with ability of making reports etc.

For those who are not ‘in’ to the total report analysis, there are two types of page hit statistics: Trend and Direct. And all services found in the provided links are absolutely free of charge and you don’t have to spend a coin to get a fair evaluation of your website.

TREND statistics:

Alexa, the best known internet gauge meter, is based on the statistical input from people using the Alexa Toolbar – obviously no more than a fragment of the internet user population. Extracting useful information from sample traffic is simple – in fact, that’s how political polls are made all the time, but it’s just like the case with polling, it is only useful for comparison, not for real information.

In many cases, that’s more than enough. Basically, a link leading to your site from any page ranking high on Alexa’s charts is more “powerful” than a link leading from a low-ranking one. That is very useful when looking for affiliate or inbound (back) links or otherwise trying to market your site as well as keeping track on your favorite competitor.

DIRECT statistics:

These are the direct actual statistics derived from your own page. Exact information on how much traffic you receive, where it comes from, how long time people spend on your page etc.

There are plenty of competitors in this area, with the common trait that they all are either directly installed into your webpage or kindly request you to add a small script to measure the actual traffic. The best approach is to employ at least two or three, just to see the different data that the others might miss – even though they all receive the same input, measurements might still differ widely between different systems.

The big players in the league are, among others, Google Analytics, Sitetracker and QuantCast (that publically displays all sites registered with their plugin like digg.com seen in the link). This site also employs the WordPress Stattraq plugin, which doesn’t show some of the data seen on the previous three, but instead provides better information on which article that catches most attention.

We get a good idea of the amount of users that we get, where they find our links (which search engine or affiliate or blog etc.). We see which pages are more popular than others. We see which pages people spend most time on. We see where they are located geographically.

Using this information, we get a good idea of what we are doing right and what we can improve and without wasting a single cent.

Wouldn’t you like to know what you’re doing right? It would take you less than ten minutes to register and a few days to start seeing the shapes. You might be surprised.