Happy New Year, everyone!

Having come from an IT background in a former life, I was discussing web sites with a friend the other day and the topic of web site stats/traffic came up. He was curious about the meaning and usefulness of these numbers his ISP kept sending him every month. Perfect - if he has trouble understanding these, there must be others - what a perfect topic for an article or two!

So I will digress from the usual topic of audio production this month to discuss web traffic and web stats.....More

First off, what am I talking about? Well - if you have a website, then you very likely get or see some numbers from your Internet Service Provider or website administrator showing how many people have seen your site, which pages they've gone to, and in some cases, how long they've been there or even where they came from. These are your web stats. They tell you statistical info about your web pages/web site that can give you some useful information about the people that visit, particularly for marketing purposes.

As a matter of fact, http://www.commercialvoices.com provides web stats for all its Platinum members.

If you go to your own page and add the word "stats.php" to the end of your URL (e.g. http://commercialvoices.com/platinum/MYPAGE/stats.php),
you will see a page that shows you the year and the hit count for that year.

Clicking on that shows you another page that breaks down the hit count by month.... and clicking on a month brings up a page that breaks down the count per page of your section. If you then click on a page, you will then get a breakdown of date, time, and IP address for each hit.

I'll leave you with that to explore on your own until next month, when I'll examine the significance of these numbers in greater detail, using one members stats as an example!

Happy stats!!

Cheers,
Bruce