I find monitoring very closely my traffic logs very important for improving them and for improving motivation. Many new webmasters make the mistake(including me at first) just sticking with the traffic logger named webalizer found inside all Cpanel hosting software. While webalizer might be very accurate for counting raw numbers of page views and search keyword hits, Google analytics gives a much better picture for analyzing purposes. If you are using a free hosted site, then you have to use a 3rd party traffic logger anyways. I highly recommend Google Analytics for all webmasters. I’m getting sick of recommending Google’s products, but frankly they have the best stuff out there at the moment.

Google analytics doesn’t pick up as many raw numbers of pageviews or visits. This is because the user has to stay on long enough to register with Google Analytics or because it was a search engine bot. One major problem with webalizer is that it shows search engine bots as “visits”. Some sites I have get equally the same amount of visits, but in analytics the actual page views by “real users” was dramatically different between the two sites. There is no reason anyways, to count the extra “junk visits” that webalizer picks up.

I like to write down each month a few of the most important quantitative stats, such as number of visits, bounce rate percentage, and average time spent on site. This allows me to monitor from month to month my traffic growth in general and results of any changes I made to my website. It can provide a lot of motivation to a webmaster when he sees the growth from month to month.