When it comes to analyzing your web site statistics, what's infinitely more important than the numbers themselves is the actual trend that they portray. If you're trying to build traffic to a web site (and who isn't these days?) then your first concern should be that the numbers are increasing on a regular basis.

To properly watch those numbers, and know when you need to make adjustments, you should not depend on analyzing statistics that have been logged over time. Instead, you should make a daily, weekly and monthly schedule to look over certain statistics.

For example, you may want to watch daily trends in traffic and page views so that any trend lasting more than a couple of days can be immediately addressed.

Once a week, you might want to look at how many hits you're getting via search engines.

And, perhaps, once per month you'll want to look at how many page views per visit are being generated by search-engines versus links, versus direct traffic.

If you're running pay-per-click advertising, it's even more important to track your clicks and where they come from on a regular basis. Small changes can easily lead to large disruptions in your income flow.

In the end, you'll need to decide for yourself which stats you should analyze daily, weekly and monthly according to your own site goals. Once you've decided which are the most important statistics to track regularly, write down a daily, weekly and monthly to-do list.

Make that plan, stick to it, and you'll find yourself infinitely more in touch with your site. You'll think about creating solutions to your challenges more often. And, in all likelihood, you'll find yourself dealing with a more and more successful web site.