Welcome to Part Two of the lesson on statistics! During this lesson, you will learn how to check your blog or site’s statistics.

This is the second of a three-part series will help you to:

• Install a real-time stat counter. (Part One)
  
• Learn how to check your stats and what you should be looking for when you analyze your stats. (Part Two)
• Learn how to improve your site’s performance using statistical data. (Part Three - the most important part of the lesson)

Let’s show you how to check your stats!:

1. Go to StatCounter.com.

2. Sign in with the user name and password you set up in Part One, and click ‘Login’. If you missed Part One, go back and use it to install your stat tracker. You are going to type your user name and password in the upper, left-hand corner:

3. Go into where your project stats are stored by clicking on your project name (outlined in red):

You will then arrive on a page that will show you some stats! You’re going to see something like this (except you’ll see a week’s worth of stats):

You will probably see more than one day’s worth of stats, and each day will look just like this.

The green bar represents the total amount of impressions for the day. The chart shows that 885 total pages were loaded on this particular day.

The blue bar represents how many different visitors I had on this day. On this particular day, 665 different people came to my site, and they loaded a total of 885 pages.

The orange bar represents how many of the 665 different people had been to my site before. 51 people had been here before they came on this particular day. In other words, they came back - they are returning visitors. Let’s show one more example to make sure we’re clear:

On the day when these stats were captured, a total of 237 people visited the site and viewed 561 pages. 59 of the 237 people had visited the site before. I’m going to save what we can learn from these stats for part three of the lesson.

Although these are the first stats that are shown to you, they aren’t the most important! There are tons of good stats in here you will want to have a look at.

On your screen in your StatCounter account, you will see this navigation (to the left). Each item in this navigation is a different type of statistic that you can learn from. I’ll describe some of these in detail in Part Three of the lesson, but here are simple explanations of what each of these do. Take the time to click to each to see for yourself!

‘Summary‘ is the first one that comes up, we already talked about the summary stats - it’s where you see the green, blue, and orange bars.

‘Popular Pages‘ are the pages of your site that are viewed the most.

‘Entry Pages‘ shows the pages that your visitors find first. Many of your visitors might not be finding your homepage first!

‘Exit Pages‘ shows the last page they looked at before they left your site.

‘Came From‘ shows what sites your visitors came from. If they found you by clicking a link, it will show you the page the link was on. The pages people came from are ranked - the ones people came from the most will appear at the top.

‘Keyword Analysis‘ shows you which keywords are your best. It shows you the keywords that have been used the most to find you. This list is displayed showing the most-used keywords at the top, and the least-used at the bottom.

‘Recent Keyword Activity‘ is very similar to ‘Keyword Analysis’, except it shows you chronologically which keywords people have found you with. The latest keywords used to find you will show at the top.

‘Recent Came From‘ is kind of like ‘Came From’ - it shows the pages your visitors came from. The difference is that ‘Recent Came From’ lists the most recent pages people came from at the top, and doesn’t rank the pages.

‘Search Engine Wars‘ will show you which search engines people are using to find you. It will show you how much of your search engine traffic is coming from each search engine, by percentage.

‘Visitor Paths‘ is one of my favorite stats. It shows which pages of your site were viewed by each visitor. You can see how each visitor went from page to page to page. You can even see at what point they left a comment!

‘Visit Length‘ shows you by percentage how long people are staying on your site. It shows you what percentage of your visitors leave after less than 5 seconds, from 5 to 30 seconds, and so on.

‘Returning Visits‘ shows you the percentage of your visitors that have been on your site before. You will see that some of your visitors are first-timers, some have been a few times, and some have been to your site 10+ times.

‘Recent Pageload Activity‘ shows you which pages of your site have been loaded recently - the most recent page to be loaded shows up at the top of the list.

‘Recent Visitor Activity‘ shows your most recent visitors’ activity. You can see how many pages they loaded, where they live, what browser they are using, and some other fun facts.

‘Recent Visitor Map‘ shows where your visitors are! It actually loads up a map and shows you where each person is.

‘Country/State/City/ISP‘ is pretty self-explanatory.

‘Browser‘ shows you the percentage of your visitors that use Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and so on.

‘System Stats‘ shows you the resolution of your visitor’s screens, and what kind of operating systems their computers have. (XP, Vista, Mac OS X, Linux, etc.)

‘Lookup IP Address‘ allows you to find a user if you know their IP address.

‘Download Log‘ allows you to download and save your stats.

Make sure you have a good look through all of your different stats today. Get comfortable with the different areas in StatCounter.com, because tomorrow we’re going to be going over the stats you should be looking at the most, and what you can learn from them.

Part Three of the lesson will probably be the most thorough less I’ve ever done! Make sure you don’t miss it, it will be here tomorrow.