No doubt you already know the value of tracking your site’s traffic. You know to look at visit totals. You know to look at what sites your visitors are coming from. You know never to rely on the number of hits. But there can be even more interesting information found in common site statistics that you can use to track down ne’er-do-wells or enhance your content.

1) Look at traffic to image files. Don’t just take note of which pages are visited most, but which images. When you see a spike on a specific image file that doesn’t mesh with the traffic on the page the image is located on, that file might be hotlinked. That means someone is using your image on his/her own site, and using your bandwidth to do it.

This happens a lot to designers whose cool images show up on MySpace profiles, or even on dishonest designers’ sites. If you find an image used for the wrong purposes, rename the file and replace the file name on all instances of your site. The image will no longer appear on the offenders’ sites and use up your bandwidth.

2) Assess your users’ connection speed. Your site stats application may not tell you the speed your users are connecting with, but it usually will tell you the host name used, which can hint at their connection speed. Grab a small sampling of those host names and look for the names of cable companies, DSL companies, and large corporations or organizations (who probably use T1). For example, you may see host names that contain comcast.com, rr.com, or irs.gov. It’s not even remotely a scientific sampling, but it should still give you a better sense of how users are connecting. The more broadband users you see, the more load-intensive content you can consider providing.

3) Don’t skip over foreign countries. Many people do this when viewing stats, especially when providing services only to a single country. But if you spot a large trend of visitors from other countries, it should clue you in that you may need to offer your site in another language, provide services to that country, or advertise there.

4) Look for hard drive referrals. You’re used to seeing referrals from other sites, but have you seen one from someone’s hard drive, like C:\jane\files\coolsites\? This can be good or bad. Lots of people still learn web design by downloading and examining their favorite sites’ code. But some use this to an extreme, reusing the entire design that you worked so hard to create. If you see a lot of hard drive referrals, add some comments to your code that your unique design is copyrighted, and include your URL in the comments.

5) Don’t stress over your stats. With site traffic, we are often victims of too much information. We stress over tiny details (why are so many people visiting at 3am?) and panic when we don’t see as many visitors today as we did yesterday. The bottom line is you should review your traffic regularly to help improve your business and reach your clients or customers, but not read into it so much that you make bizarre changes to your business model (we’re a design firm, but let’s start selling coffee because so many people visit at 3am!).

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 26th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Design, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.