I love to watch statistics, specifically those associated with my various Wenatchee real estate related websites.    It helps me determine if internet surfers are finding my real estate website easily and whether they determine it to be useful for gathering information and finding properties.   Statistics also tell me if my website performance is improving.  By "performance", I mean whether it's easy to find and whether more people are finding it each month.   

I'm always striving to improve my Search Engine rankings, which makes my real estate site(s) easier to find.  I also work diligently to make the sites useful... and am constantly working on ways to improve the information available.    I get tons of statistics from my site statistics section, some of which I find useful and some of it is just for true computer geeks (so  I ignore it).  Some of these statitics, however, are truly interesting and I like to watch regularly on both my primary real estate weblog  and this blog.

The first thing I look at, of course, is overall traffic but there's more to it than just number of "hits" per month.  I DO NOT track individual computers or the activity of individuals... but I do get daily reports of such things as: 1) total visitors, 2) unique visitors, 3) how long they stay, 4) how many pages are viewed, 5) which search engines are sending me visitors, 6) and how many people bookmark my site as a "favorite". 

I find all of this interesting AND like to track and compare activity from month to month.  This is how I determine, in my own mind, whether the site performance is improving.   For example, by tracking how long people stay I can tell if they find the site interesting and useful enough to surf around for a while checking out all the info and actually searching for specific properties available in the Wenatchee real estate market area. 

Over the last six months:
* My Google search engine traffic has increased from 1/2% of total traffic to 14% of total traffic
* Most of my traffic comes from MSN (43%) and Yahoo (42%)
   These two things tell me my search engine rankings on MSN and Yahoo are very good and that my persistent work to improve my Google search engine rankings is working!  Patience truly is a virtue. 

My visitor traffic has increased from 686 per month to 1031 per month.  Suppose this is because Google now finds me?   I think there is a definite correlation.
Unique visitors vary between 435 to 598 per month
  ("unique visitors" are new visitors, meaning new people that have found me.  The difference between "unique visitors" and "visitors" tells me whether people are coming back for new information).

I hope you find all of my sites useful and interesting:
  Primary real estate website
  This residential real estate blog
  My investment real estate blog
  My personal blog

If you have any suggestions for improvement on any of these sites, please let me know!

Oh... one other thing:  I get quite a bit more traffic on this blog than I do on my primary real estate website... like 300% - 1000% more traffic.   I'm not quite sure why that is.   Perhaps a lot of people are looking for information in general and aren't necessarily looking to search for specific properties.