Stats and Tracking

To operate an AdSense website successfully, you need to have good stats installed in your hosting space, and you need to track your AdSense stats as well. These two sets of numbers and data can really help you to be able to Fine tune your site, and to see progress.

One of the difficulties that every new site owner faces is that if you advertise through free and low cost methods, it takes time to build, and it is very slow at first. If you try paid advertising, then you need to track the stats for that also, so that you'll be able to tell whether it is worth your money or not. If you understand what the numbers mean, and what to look for, it can really help you to not get discouraged, and to understand if your site is on track or not.

I prefer RealTimeStats for stats tracking. It produces a range of data that helps me know just how much traffic is coming in, from where, and to what pages. I can tell how long people are staying on my site, and a ton of other more or less helpful information. Here are some of the stats, and what they mean:

Unique visits - This is the number of visitors (does not include robots or spiders). A "unique" visitor is a visitor who is theoretically visiting your site for the first time. Repeat visitors are counted separately.

Total visits - This counts uniques and repeats both. Somewhere it will often have a "visits per visitor" number, which can be a decimal number. 1.4 visits per visitor is an example of this stat.

Visits per Month - This is the number that most people want when they quote stats for a site. This may be given in Uniques, or Totals, so make sure you understand which is which. This is the number that also helps you spot long term trends. It is very important that you focus LESS on the actual numbers, and MORE on the TREND. If your site is showing steady growth, then you are making progress, and can pat yourself on the back!

Visits per Day - This number is often reported only in total visits. It can help you spot trends of growth sooner than a monthly stat.

Spiders that Visited - This will let you know with a new site whether Google, Yahoo (Inktomi), or MSN have spidered your site for indexing yet. It can also tell you when other spiders are picking it up.

Pages Visited - A breakdown of visits by page can help you to know which pages are popular in your site. If you are paying for traffic, and you get a ton of traffic to your home page, but almost none anywhere else, then you can see quickly that people are not getting past your home page. If you are getting a high amount of hits on a single page, you'll know that it might help to provide more information of that kind. This section of stats can give more information about which pages people are coming in on, and which ones they are leaving on also.

Traffic Origin - This will show you the referring URL, or the referring search engine. Now, it is not 100% accurate! About half of your traffic won't have an origin listed. It can still be useful to know what is working and what is not though, for the other half. You can tell by this whether you are getting traffic from the major search engines yet, and whether or not you are getting traffic from direct links that are on other people's sites.

Search Terms - This, again, is not highly accurate. It only reports search terms from certain engines. It can still help you see what is bringing people to your site though, and whether the words that bring them there are actually related to the content that you have. If they are not, then you need to tweak your content and optimize for more accurate terms. Sometimes this can let you know what people want that you don't have yet as well, and give you ideas for a new direction to grow your site in.

404 Errors - You can often get a log of the 404 (page not found) errors on your site. You'll get a ton of these if you do not have a robots.txt file, because every search engine that spiders you will want one. Other than that though, you can check your 404s to help spot broken links in a large site, and generally to keep it better maintained.

Google also gives you a range of stats for your Ads which can help you. If you have multiple sites, it is a good idea to set up "channels", which allow you to track ad performance by URL. You are limited to 200 of these though, so if you, like me, have thousands of pages, you really have to just track by category, and not by the individual page.

Google stats can tell you very quickly which of your sites are earning, how well they are earning, and whether they are getting an average, below average, or above average $ to visitor return. I'd suggest that for most sites (not considering the topic), if you are getting $1 for every 50 visitors or better, then you are on the right track. Optimizing might help you do better, but you have the potential to earn well with the site. If you are getting less than that, then you need to optimize your site better.

Stats tracking is something you do to help you to know the direction you should go with improvements. It is not the driving force behind your site, but it can really help you to fine tune your site for better performance.