Some who know me well we know that I love anything with numbers. I loved maths & achieved the highest results in my class at A level. I am not intimidated by formula. In fact unlike any other subject, you can get the answers wrong and still get great scores. To me that is a win win situation & I think maths get bad press.
So I suppose it is only natural that I enjoy the statistics behind web views. I have a number of tracking codes installed on the site, I am great with viewing the system log. I take great confort in seeing where all our visits are from, where they were referred etc. The system log literally shows every visit & action on the site. I often randomly select IP addresses to see how they correlate with the various trackers that I have. Whilst this is superfluous ,reading the stats, the entry pages and in particular the referral sites is very useful. Yesterday for example someone I am familiar with was reading blogger and clicked on the link for the lotto which was advertised by one of my US users. This is particularly interesting & flattering as these visitors are web designers themselves. Another old friend visited the site and her brother who is a web designer has shown great interest in it, I am being sent many well wishes and compliments on a great web site.
I know which social sites refer not just the most traffic but also the most relevant. Twitter is great as a numbers game, clearly excellent for rankings, but very little of it is relevant. Other sites require a tiny amount of work and drive high volume target traffic to the site. These are particularly rewarding but the small amount of work is limited because of imposed restrictions.
So whilst numbers, stats etc can be dull for many, they are vital in measuring and driving traffic to any website. If it fills you with dread, then start by looking at the maps, then the IP adresses. One of the programs I use actually gives me the name, address, telephone number and email address of the user. We have in the early stages been a victim of hack attemps. This is an invaluable tool if site security is an issue. Every action is recorded by the system log within the individual website. Our hack attempt was recorded on our website log with the actual IP alongside. It is important that if this is evident that pictures, or screen shots are taken as evidence. You can then match this IP using various free tools on the web. Hackers will often "throw" their IP to another country, as they did with us. However in our case their server provider was not disguised. Foolishly they had a dedicated server and we had undeniable proof with a screen shot of the attempts, the site, the system log and the various tracking programs we used.
Hack attempts are rare but a real threat to this industry. The law is harsh, & rightly so on offenders. If like us you are fortunate that this happens early then you can use it to your advantage. We were able to tighten up security on the site, we were also able to trace the offenders easily. Our developer was employed as a site hacker for some of the largest global banks & this has been an invaluable advantage. Hacking attempts are intended to be destructive, if, like us, this is more of a nuisance than a catastrophy, then learn from it, work with it. Who knows, you may even get to love the stats!
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