If you really want to run an effective advertising campaign in this world where old forms of advertising are collapsing (Newspapers, Television, Phone Books, Radio) and new Internet based forms of advertising are taking their place you need to have access to statistics programs for your website and understand how to best use them for your business's benefit. For example you can of course use the programs to see how many people went into your website each day. But we think it's almost important to understand "how they got their" and "What they did before they left. For instance did they come from Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, or did they come from other source on the Internet such as advertisements in the local newspapers website, the television stations website, the radio stations website, the online phone books, etc. If they come from Google and Yahoo your website is doing it's job because after the cost of building these visitors are basically free. If they come from other forms of advertising that you paid for and so it's important to be able to know how many people you received per dollar spent. For example, I have personally worked with companies where it turned out that the numbers given to them by the newspapers and television stations (click and impressions) were grossly in error. In fact, we found that the cost per person coming from these sites was $400 and $500 respectively (Our client cancelled this advertising when we pointed it out to them saving the clients huge amounts of money). On the other hand visitors from Google, Yahoo, Craigslist, Free Online Directories, etc were basically free. Another example of how important statistics is viewing how many people who visit your website come back a second time, how many pages they visit and whether they go to your "About Us" and "Contact Us" pages. People that come back a second time, visit many pages and go to your About and Contact pages are interested in what you have to say on your website and your products. On the other hand if people only come once. only visit one or two pages, don't use the About or Contact pages most likely do not like what they found on your website (which presents you with an opportunity to change it) The programs our clients can use free of charge to see their website statistics are AWSTATS and Google Analytics. Please click the preceding pages for more information on these programs. | 
