Tim Flight

Today marks the last day of May so I’ll be gathering monthly website statistics today and tomorrow. Today I’ll be gathering stats regarding my position on the search engines. Tomorrow website traffic statistics.

A popular suggestion for dieters is not to pay too much attention to your daily weight. The body naturally fluctuates a little bit each day so instead weighing yourself weekly is encouraged. I feel the same way about search engine rankings. Your time is better spent elsewhere rather than watching if you moved up or down one position day to day.

I track seventy-five keywords and keyphrases across a few domains. Those seventy five positions I track jumped a total of 168 positions. I only had one out of seventy-five keywords drop this month so I guess I’m doing something right.

Tomorrow I’ll start to put together website statistics for the Month of May. Currently I use AWstats to track web site statistics. It is free, customizable, and provides most of the reports I desire. It can even specify my own IP address into the configuration files so that my own traffic isn’t counted. The one thing that I don’t like is that it doesn’t allow you to run reports across a custom date range. Most everything is seen in a monthly view. So I can’t answer such questions as “how many times was suchandsuchapage.html accessed today.

Thus I’m considering purchasing the Urchin statistics package. It comes with a fairly hefty price tag. I’m currently considering the ROI on the package. If more of my clients were involved in reading and interpreting statistics it would be an easier cost to justify. However I only have a handful of clients that access their statistics on a regular basis. Therefore I believe I’d be purchasing Urchin mostly for myself… and that might not be such a bad thing after-all.

And for whomever might care… my five largest sites all will have record traffic levels this month.

Tim Flight
Analyzing My Website Statistics

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 31st, 2005 at 10:38 am and is filed under Computer Technology, Website Development. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.