If you are just starting a website or web-based business, it is important to find out about website statistics: what they are and how to use them to your advantage. In order to successfully build your web presence, you need to have a way of tracking unique users to your website, as well as the ability to track the click through rate for advertising campaigns.

Website Statistics Defined

The mention of statistical information sends some people running for cover. In reality, website statistics can be as simple or complex as you need them to be. Most website hosting packages come with a tool for gathering basic statistics. The information is then delivered to you via charts, tables and graphs.

Simple website statistics tell the website owner how many hits their website received at what time of day and how many pages were visited by unique users . Website statistics also usually include information about the visitor's geographic location, where they were referred to your website from (like a search engine), and how much time they spent on each page.

Why Website Statistics Are Important

The reason website statistics are important to you as a website owner is that they allow you to see, graphically, what kind of attention your website is getting so that you can make choices about how to drive more traffic to your website. It allows you to see which days of the week or times of the day your website receives the heaviest traffic, so that you can target web advertising to those days and times when the most people are looking.

How to Use Website Statistics

The information contained in your website statistics is valuable, not only for setting up an advertising campaign, but also for tracking how effectively the campaign is at driving traffic to your website and converting that traffic into sales. There are a number of ways this information is useful to you.

First, website statistics will tell you if a newly implemented advertising campaign, such as Google Adwords or banner ads, run on high profile websites are, in fact, generating more traffic. Second, if you are selling products or services from your website, you will be able to track where your sales are coming from. In this way, you can tell which marketing efforts are succeeding and which one's aren't succeeding.

Click Through Rate

Click through rate is another term that you will hear often in website advertising. The click through rate is the number of times a unique user clicks on your ad divided by the number of ad impressions, or number of times the ad was shown. This number is expressed as a percentage and is one way of measuring the success of an online ad campaign.

If you are new to website statistics and online advertising, spend some time looking at your statistics. If you are planning an ad campaign to drive more traffic to your website, keep a close eye on how different types of ads effect your website statistics.