The answer is ______ . Amazingly there are many small businesses (and larger ones) who do not have a clue about the most basic of web statistics. Hundreds, maybe thousands of dollars poured into developing the website, more money poured into maintaining the website yet no time spent on figuring out what are the site’s numbers.

Here is a short list of things to know:

Visits

How many visits a day your site gets. This number can vary depending upon what traffic software you use but any one is better than none. For BostonOffline.com, Sitemeter(free) is used along with Webalizer which is built into the hosting program.

Referrals

Where is your traffic coming from? Direct requests (someone types in www.yoursite.com into the address bar)? Google or Yahoo searches? Links from other sites (especially important if measuring the effectiveness of link exchanges or how popular your site is becoming)?

Stickiness

How long are people staying on your website? Sitemeter does a good job of logging every visitors total time spent on the site (non-identifiably of course). Read more on how to improve stickiness from About.com’s web design guide.
Knowledge of these three simple aspects of your website will help in knowing where you stand on the web. In the next post I’ll talk about different ways I drive traffic to this site.

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