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Tips & tricks
General tips
Use the most recent version of browser to access the statistics. Some older
versions may not display the reports correctly or may not refresh the report
screens correctly. If you use Internet Explorer 6, set it to refresh pages with
“every visit to the page”. You can do it in IE6 under Tools – Internet Options -
General – Settings - Every visit to the page
Add a "favicon.ico" file to the root directory of your web site. Also add the
"favicon.ico" file to every directory of your site. When a visitor, using Internet
Explorer 5+ , bookmarks your site, a request is made for the file "favicon.ico" By
knowing the number of hits from the total browser hits and those just Internet
Explorer 5 or later, you can get a good ballpark figure of the total number of
bookmarks to your site. You can see if you are getting new visitors and if the
number is improving from the Bookmarked report. (Repeat visitors have probably
book-marked you page already and will not bookmark it again). By placing a
"favicon.ico" file in every directory, you can also see which directories are
bookmarked.
Use the Top Search Keywords and Top Search Phrases reports under the Referrer
heading to see which keywords or phrases visitors used to find your site. Gather
statistics for a couple of months before you decide on your search phrases. Build
focused pages around queries and ensure that you have pages within your Web
site with good, solid content for these terms to please the crawlers. Do not pick
keywords that are too popular or broad. Once you have set everything up, add
the keywords or phrases in the META tags and submit to search engines.
Analyzing tips
Do not over analyze. Use the Parento principle (also know as the 80 - 20
percent principle) when analyzing a web site. This means that you should first
focus on the clients that generate most of the traffic to your web site, the
referrers that refer most traffic to your web site, the countries that most of your
clients come from, the incorrect links that cause most errors, etc.
Look for visitors that do not click past your home page. If the number of single
access pages is unreasonably high or visitors seldom click past your homepage,
this can indicate a weak page that does not motivate visitors to look further. A
graphic that takes a long time to load on a main entry page and is used as an
entry page is a definite No-No. When using a Flash entry page, also create a link