The main reason for analyzing statistical information for your website is to discover the daily and weekly trends of the traffic in your site. Knowing how to read statistical data from these reports puts you in a much better position to research for your marketing campaigns and to see what works and what does not. If you really know what you want, then you can begin determining the best marketing methods from the statistical data in web site traffic reports. This way, you will not waste valuable time with a marketing system that does not generate good traffic sales.

The statistical reports with "numbers" can be misleading. Often times, "hits" are counted in different ways. Just because someone visits your website does not necessarily mean that they read any of the information, or watched your video. The main idea about using website statistics is to use them to identify trends. By doing this, you can gauge your traffic over time to see if the flow is increasing or decreasing.

Looking for trends helps you to recognize if your new marketing campaign is having any major increase or decrease in your traffic flow. From this standpoint, you can now look more closely at why the new campaign is not heading the way you expected it to and what are the actions you can take to fix the problem. Statistical data will also give you a good indication of whether you should wait awhile longer or take immediate action.

When using website statistics, there are four major categories you should be concerned with.

1. The number of unique visitors helps to determine if the site is getting more or less visitors each month. Their location will tell you the visitor's origin. This can be very important to you if the concern you have is that your campaign reaches a global market, other than within the United States. Depending on the ISP, you should at least be able to pin down which countries most of the visitors are coming from.

It is also important to be able to distinguish "hits" from "visitors". Every person visiting your site is a "visitor". Every time a visitor looks at a different page, clicks on a graphic, or clicks on any content within your pages, these are considered "hits". Do not get your statistics confused with hits versus visitors.

2. "Time of Day Activity" is an area in your website's statistics that helps determine what days of the week you have the most action on your site and at what times this happens. It is important for you to know that one of the busiest times for traffic searches on the Internet is that on weekdays, right after lunch time. Knowing the times of day that your website activity spikes also helps you pinpoint more closely where in the US many of your visitors are coming from; the east coast, or the west, etc.

3. The statistics on "Pages" gives you a lot of insight into where everyone is going within your website. Knowing that gives you the opportunity to beef up some of the pages that are not getting a lot of traffic.

4. The Error report will let you know if some people have had problems getting around your site. This report will allow you to fix the bugs or have chats with your web host.

Knowing how to read your statistic reports puts you ahead when making crucial business decisions about your sites and campaigns. The reports are useful tools that can help you find the right marketing approach to get good traffic to your site.