Web Statistics: Get Your Fair Share!

The 'Information Age' predicted by so many pundits in the early 90s is now a reality. With it, the ability to acquire useful information is often more valuable than even the finest skills and crafts. We truly live in an era when information is one of our biggest assets.

As webmasters our sources of information are plentiful. We have information in the form of content on our sites, but we also have information such as which site designs are most effective and which of our partnerships have increased site traffic. We're drowning in useful information!

The main problem is that it's all our own information. To see the benefits of making certain adjustments to your site, you actually have to do them and see what the result is. We also have to dig around and find other sites willing to trade links, and so on. Wouldn't it be a lot easier if we could just see the statistics for other people's sites and then make a decision? Well now you can!

Why Research is Good

Researching your competitors and business peers is a good idea because it allows you to broaden your experience of Web statistics and also get some information you can use constructively. You can also come across some unexpected information which will give you further ideas for your site's design or marketing strategy. But, what can you really expect to find out?

Given the right conditions the amount of things you can find out about other sites is enormous. You can find out how many visitors they get over varying periods of time, where those visitors come from geographically, how they got to the site via links on other sites, and much more.

Once you have this information, you can observe design changes they make over varying periods of time and see how they affect their visitor counts. You could also see who is linking to them a lot and where they're getting their traffic from. This gives you a good indicator of sites who are willing to trade links or are interested in that type of content.

Another very interesting you can use the statistics for is to find out how people find sites through search engines. For example, a site may seem to be getting a lot of hits from people who were searching for 'tomato growing'. You can use this knowledge to look through the site's code and text to work out how it's doing so well with this phrase.

Of course, the first thing to do is actually find out whether the statistics you require are actually available. In many cases, they are but if not then there's millions of other sites to check. You're bound to never run out of opportunities to find useful statistics!

Finding statistics - Method 1

Accessing unprotected information on a public Web site is legal, isn't it? Interestingly, many companies don't place much value on their site statistics and leave them open on the site for you to analyze and review.

Unfortunately, finding them can be a chore but on about a quarter of sites the following method will work. Simply enter the site's URL into your Web browser and place one of the following lines at the end, one of them may work:

If you want a demonstration of how popular looking at other sites' statistics is, then look at the statistics for sugababes.co.uk (an up and coming British girl group's site). Nearly as many people have viewed the statistics page as have actually been to the site in total!

You may be greeted by a username and password box when trying to access statistics. If so, don't proceed any further! If you go any further then you're technically an unauthorized person attempting to access protected content. Don't go too far in trying to get information. Stay within the law. If you have problems, just try another site.

Finding statistics - Method 2

When it works method one provides you with some great information, but if it doesn't then there's actually an easier way of finding the statistics you require. Many sites use external tracking scripts (such as Hitbox or Extreme-DM) to keep a log of who has visited. This is a great system for statistics lovers since most external tracking script systems allow you to obtain the information you want.

The way to look for an external tracking script is to just visit the site and examine the main pages. If they have a regular graphical counter then this may be all you can use, since some people don't really care about site statistics and only use a simple numeric counter. If this is the case, you might be out of luck with this method!

What you're really looking for is a graphic or box which doesn't seem to have any purpose on the page. It may be a small irregular shaped advert box, or just an odd logo with a link. The tracker provided by extreme-dm.com displays a square black box with a blue ball surrounded by a ring. Clicking on this box takes you to a statistics page for the site you're viewing. Other people use tricks to shrink their tracker box down to a a single pixel, so look out for any stray pixels and try clicking on them!

There are a lot of different external trackers, but if they're password protected you could be out of luck again! However, you'll find that at least 50% of the sites with visible external trackers don't password protect their information and you can have a good look through and learn a lot about the site you're investigating. Useful!

Other uses for the statistics

A key thing to remember is that you don't just have to investigate your competitors. Any site that has statistics on it could be useful to you. For example, by looking at lots of sites with publicly available statistics I learned that the average Internet Explorer to Netscape ratio on the Web is about 90 to 10!

Details such as these can be useful since they provide a bigger picture of the Web and aren't findings just based on your own site. Only 1% of your visitors may run at a 640*480 resolution, but you'll find the average percentage is higher. Perhaps there's a design flaw in your site which explains why 640*480 users never return?

Conclusion

This article has not been an exhaustive guide to Web statistics but we hope it has motivated you to pay more attention to the large amounts of useful information available in future. Remember that you can get statistics from many major sites merely by trying out the two techniques in this article.

If you know what types of users the Web is made up of, you can redefine and adapt your site's design and marketing techniques accordingly. Now, go and try to find out some useful information about your Web peers, and use it to your benefit. You might learn something!