Since the STC UK website moved to a new hosting company last year, we have had the ability to monitor the traffic of the site by viewing usage statistics.

Now, many web statisticians will warn of the danger of drawing the wrong conclusions from web statistics. You can easily over-react to what turn out to be irregular figures and devise strategies based upon them, sending you in completely the wrong direction. You can make changes to a site or the way it's promoted, but only test to see if the changes have worked several months later, at which time there may be other factors influencing the site stats.

However, despite the potential pitfalls, web usage statistics can give you an interesting insight into how well your site is functioning and how people use it.

By way of example, I've taken a look at the statistics for March this year and I'll share a summary of them with you.

During the month we had a total of 2,087 sessions on the site, an average of 67 per day. A session is defined as one visit by one user to a website, irrespective of how many pages they looked at and how long they stayed.

The month saw a total of 6,215 page views, averaging 200 a day.

The most requested page was the homepage with 12.76% of all page views - the homepage was also the most common entrance point to the site. Second in the most-viewed page category was the job ads page at 4.47%, with the SurveyMonkey review from the February newsletter coming in third with 3.12%. Fourth was the Programme page with 3.06%.

The page which topped the poll for the highest average length of page view was the August 2005 newsletter homepage, at 8 minutes and 16 seconds.

The majority of people, 79%, reach the site by entering the URL directly into their browser's address bar. A total of 4.65% reach us via google.com, with 2.16% coming from MSN Search, 1.96% from google.co.uk, and 1.44% from a referral on the STC Europe homepage.

Usefully, the statistics inform us that the most popular search term people used to find our site was "surveymonkey" at 10.89%, followed by "stc+uk" with 7.78%. Coming in at number 10 was "300th+anniversary+of+pi".

In terms of the search engines people use to find the site, the one generating the most hits was google.com, followed in order by msn.com, google.co.uk, google.com.au, sympactico.msn.ca, google.ie, search.yahoo.com, and msn.co.uk.

And finally, the most popular user setup is Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP at 43% of visitors, with Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 2000 in second at 11%.

So, now I've bombarded, baffled, and blinded you with the statistics, what does all this mean?

Well, that's the difficult part.

What we do know is that people are using the site, which is a good thing. We also know that people are finding the site via search engines, which is also a good thing. However, it would perhaps be better if more people were finding the site after searching for "Technical Authors" rather than "surveymonkey". So this is an example of an action that can be taken to try to increase our rankings on search engines for key phrases.

Most people who visit the site already know the site and are visiting by directly entering the URL. We can assume, although not guarantee, that most of these users are not new site visitors. Perhaps through other strategies, such as increasing links on other sites, we could increase the number of hits from people who haven't visited us before.

The statistics actually go much deeper than those I've outlined in this article. You can see how long people stay at the site, and what the entry and exit pages are. It's hard to know what is normal web behaviour compared to behaviour that is unique to our site, but most visits to the site are for very small lengths of time. Are we not providing people with what they want, or is this the effect of search engine robots checking for the existence of pages? Perhaps it's the webmaster or other site editors who are making quick checks to proofread content.

It's encouraging to see that among page views, articles associated with newsletters rank highly. Clearly one driving factor in a site's ability to attract and keep visitors is the provision of interesting and informative content. It looks like our newsletter team is doing a grand job judging by the hit rates.

And in many ways that’s the most important lesson - which is more common sense rather than anything statistics can tell you – content is the most important factor in attracting and retaining visitors, and as long as we continue to provide useful and engaging articles, people will use the site.