Most marketing and PR directors who I deal with will take an occasional look at their stats to review page views and unique visitors, but they're often too busy to spend any more time on them. Digging down into your web site or blog stats will often reveal some hidden gems of information.
Two great areas to look at are the referral logs and incoming domain information. Most web stats programs will provide this information, but sometimes the report given only lists the top five or ten entries. See if you can expand that segment to get the complete list.
Referrals
Referrals are the domain name or URL of a link to your site. If you run a blog sometimes the TrackBack function will take care of this, but only if the person linking to you uses a major blogging platform (and has the feature turned on). Looking at your raw stats gives you the complete list of who is linking to you.
Recently there have been cases of 'hidden' or 'under development' web sites that have been 'outed' by referral links. Corporate Blogging recently discovered an internal blog for the 2006 World Cup by reviewing their referral logs. Earlier this year Steve Rubel found CNET's RSS reader by reviewing his logs.
Back in Janurary of this year my post about Media Monitoring with RSS generated a number of inbound links, quite a few of them were from corporate intranets. When I tried to access the URLs I was often told that the page was not available to me :-)
If you are a corporation and you see a great deal of links from one source you probably want to find out why. Is the linking site saying something good or bad about you? Are there possibilities of a business relationship with somebody that is linking to you?
Incoming Domains
Incoming domain data is simply the hostname or ISP of the person who is visiting your site. The majority of the time groups of users will be lumped under one major domain such as aol.com, verizon.net or rr.com (Road Runner). Some small businesses that utilize local DSL or cable ISPs will also be 'hidden' behind the ISPs domain. Most large corporations though will show up under their domain names, i.e. apple.com, microsoft.com, yahoo.com. If you see something like fedex.com in your logs that means somebody who works for FedEx is looking at your site. The question now becomes, 'why is company X looking about my site/blog?' or perhaps 'look my competitor was all over my site.'
Looking over my logs some interesthing names and trends appear. What do employees of Boeing (boeing.com) look at? They look at my posts about the Airbus A380. Yahoo was here the other day, looking at my post about Yahoo deactivating accounts.
Success Story
Many years ago I had a web client that was very diligent about reviewing his stats every day. The product he manufactured and sold was a very high-dollar item with only about 100 potential corporate buyers in the US and he had two competitors in his industry.
One day while reviewing his logs he sees the domain name for a corporation he is interested in talking to. They've been checking him out. Later that day he called the corporation and via a series of phone hand-offs finally talked to the person who would most likely be in charge of purchasing his product.
He didn't want to spook the guy by saying, "saw you checking out my site," so he played it cool. He just introduced himself and told him what he sold. Response from the corporate VP? "Wow this is quite a coincidence, I was just looking at your site this morning."
The corporate VP had also checked out the two other competitors that morning since he was shopping around, but the quick action by my client sealed the deal. When the deal was signed is was a multi-unit purchase worth millions, and the largest sale of my client's life.
Other Trends
Reviewing my stats shows some other interesting trends. A few months back I wrote my theory about the television program Lost. As a result I get inbound links from the major search engines from people searching for 'lost theories.' Traffic picks up late Tuesday and builds up until the show airs on Wednesday nights and then gets another bump late Wednesday night and Thursday morning.
Bottom Line, Spend the Time
The first step to properly analyzing your stats is to make sure you are collecting the information and can quickly and easily review it. In my case, my ISP e-mails me a custom recap report every morning. I spent some time upfront to create the report that gave me the information I wanted in a snapshot. Total time requirement? One hour plan/prep and then less than 2 minutes each morning. If anything interesting presents itself I might spend additional time doing some research.
Next time you are looking at your stats spend a few extra moments and dig deeper. You might be amazed with what you find.
