Working Smarter and Not Wasting Time
Posted On: 2007-09-17
Years ago it was almost a mantra on several industry newbie boards that beginners should never worry about their stats. Pouring over your stats was just a complete and utter waste of time according to the gurus on those boards and newbies could spend their time far more profitably by building ... building ... and building some more.
Of course newbies could glance occasionally at their sponsor stats just to see how much money they were making but that was all they should be doing. Server stats were something that newbies just didn't need to be looking at. There was even the implied threat that looking at your stats would become addictive and so newbies would end up wasting even more time.
At the time I agreed with that idea. Why waste time looking at stats when you could be actively making money by building more sites and more galleries. At the same time most newbies wouldn't have had a lot of stats to look at anyway and so any trends that may have been beginning to appear would have been too vague to notice. And there was also the thought that most newbies wouldn't know what they were looking for anyway.
So it lots of ways it was a bit like telling a kid not to masturbate or he would go blind. It might have felt good and been quite natural but it was bad for you so you shouldn't be doing it.
Now when you tell a child that they shouldn't masturbate or they'll go blind they tend to get a little worried and there's a guilt element that creeps in and stays with them as they grow into adults. And there is that guilt element in looking at your stats too. I shouldn't be doing it ... it's a waste of time ... it's not helping me make any money.
But of course, checking your server stats does help you make money. It can help you make a hell of a lot of money so why we set newbies on this never-ending guilt trip about checking their stats is completely beyond me.
So if you're a newbie then let me urge you to start spending time checking your stats. In fact get so involved in checking your stats that you start to take notes so that over time you can spot any trends that may start to develop. The trends that you're going to be looking for revolve around things like who are your biggest referrers and what search strings are being used to find your sites.
Obviously knowing which sites are sending you the most traffic is going to help you to concentrate on those sites and not waste too much time submitting to sites that aren't going to send you any hits. It will also help you work out whether or not any fees you're paying to some sites to accept your submissions is money well-spent or not.
Knowing which search strings are working is like finding a rich vein of gold because those are the search strings that you continue to work on. You might also find that the search terms you thought were important to you are not nearly as important as some terms you didn't even realize the search engines were finding on your pages.
Recently a client asked us to take over the management of their website and, at the same time, rebuild it to bring it up to a decent standard. One of the questions Steve asked her was what search terms were people using to find her site and the client didn't have a clue.
Not only didn't she have any idea but she didn't even have access to her server stats so we were really flying blind as we began to redevelop her site. Today Steve went in to look at her new stats on our server and found that people were coming to her site via terms we'd never even thought of. Fortunately the new site isn't live yet so we can go back and tweak the text to take into account those new terms.
At the same time as your checking recent stats have a look to see if your stats package can give you some figures for the past 12 months. If they do you might be surprised to find which pages have attracted the most traffic over that period of time. Sometimes they can be very old pages ... pages you had forgotten that you had ... but pages that are still there making you money.
If you find pages like that in your stats go and have a look at them. I wouldn't be in a rush to add to them if those pages are getting traffic from link lists or TGPs but you might be able to change the ads if some of the sponsors on the page have disappeared or aren't converting as well as might be.
So don't feel guilty about taking time out to check your stats. They're a goldmine of information that can help you make a lot more money. In fact I would go so far as to say that time spent checking your stats is far more about working smarter not harder than it is about wasting time.