I run the website BeNews (http://www.benews.com), a news, editorial and reviews site about BeOS, an Operating System much like Windows or Linux. Mine is not an adult site, even though BeOS is sometimes referred to as the Porn OS due to it’s mutimedia capabilities; I really think that it does not matter where you use your stats, just that you use them effectively.I run the website BeNews (http://www.benews.com), a news, editorial and reviews site about BeOS, an Operating System much like Windows or Linux. Mine is not an adult site, even though BeOS is sometimes referred to as the Porn OS due to it’s mutimedia capabilities; I really think that it does not matter where you use your stats, just that you use them effectively. So I will give you some first hand examples of how I, or rather my team, used the stats from Counted!, the non-porn counterpart of Sex Trail, to improve BeNews.
It must be stated that no statistics system will tell you, “Do this to get more hits,” or “Change this to remove layout problems for Opera [a browser] users.” You need to closely supervise the stats: Look at them, think about them, think about your site, your visitors, your customers, their relations and the improvements you can make to your site. You, not the stats, improve your site. However, there are some things to keep in mind with your stats.
Links are an important aspect to your success. With my sites, I have a lot of links inside portals like Yahoo, Slashdot, the Mozilla Side Bar, Bookmark lists and many others. This is something we always monitor. Here is an example: We are getting 200 hits a day from Slashdot because all our news items are featured on the side bar of Slashdot. However, sometimes, we suddenly get lots more hits than usual. Via our statistics, we can then see that one of our news stories made it on the main news section on Slashdot for everyone to see, which might result in 2,000 hits an hour or more (Our server can handle this kind of load thankfully as having a story on Slashdot has brought down a lot of servers for a day or two). The point is, if your hit rate suddenly changes, then you need to know why.
The statistics are also very good to monitor what kind of articles or general changes reflect in more hits on your site. It helped us learn what articles people like to read and which they just ignore. You can then focus on the things that will actually get you what you want. To relate this in the world of porn, you can rotate your image galleries between (legal) teen, interracial and porn stars. Through your statistics and referrers, you will learn which sites to contact in regards to your new additions, so that those sites will link to you.
My team recently did a redesign. For the project, we wanted to know which browsers to work with. Most people surf with IE (Internet Explorer), but being a BeOS news site, we also had a lot of people using Mozilla, the aforementioned Opera, NetPositive and even more obscure browsers. As a result, my development team started coding with all many of these browsers. This of course can make for a maddening experience. It’s important to factor your stats with the different browsers available.
Opera is a very nice browser and very compliant to W3C regulations. That also means that you will end up having a lot of errors on your page that IE just ignores. So we had spaces in tables and next to images, weird line brakes and strange colors. Boy, was it a pain. You need to know this possibilty beforehand because otherwise, you will get 1,000 people mailing you that your page suddenly is not viewable at all or that the search button is not clickable.
When we were done with the redesign and launched the new page, we got almost no negative feedback. This makes it really worth while. Become familiar with the different kinds of browsers, otherwise, you will not know what to do before you start. We knew. We acted on it. We got the reward.
Another thing that we looked at from the start was getting the page smaller and loading faster than before. Using our stat program, we could monitor the load times. We were happy to see the load times going down. Wonderful. It’s no use having visitors if they can’t view your page.
We also monitor our stats daily to see trends. As already stated, it is always good to know what things pull and which do not, to know what to spend time on producing. That is the only way you can grow each day. We look at the multi-page stats to see which articles are doing good, but also just look at the general visitors and impressions count as well as the time-of-stay to see if we are “sticky” enough.
Another thing we used was the guest login. We gave advertisers access to parts of the stats to show them how the site is performing over time. We also put some exit stats links on some buttons to give advertisers info on how many people really click their buttons. That way, they feel that they are in control. They can see for themselves what is happening without the need to believe every word we are saying.
I hope you can draw some information from it and I hope these tips are worthwhile for you.
