But when it comes to websites, sometimes less is more. Elements such as widgets, scripts, and other add-ons do a lot of cool things and can increase a site’s functionality. But sometimes they have the undesirable side effect of slowing down the site.

Back in November, Ghostery.com posted results of their research for which website elements slow the Internet most in the U.S. (See: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016022107.) On their top 10 list of “lagtags,” which include a variety of site elements, the real-time script for our very own Site Analytics was in slot eight. (Ouch.)

After the Site Analytics team contacted Ghostery.com to learn more about their findings, our developers implemented a few updates from their feedback that made a huge difference.

In January, Ghostery.com updated their latency research and posted the results. It shows a huge improvement in Site Analytics’ latency, with a 44-percent decrease. Check it out: http://purplebox.ghostery.com/?p=1016022235.

While this is only one small example of how feedback makes a difference, this kind of stuff happens all the time. We really do want to make the Internet a better place, and a lot of what we do to make that happen begins from feedback.

With two simple but very powerful reports, Site Analytics gives you the ability to quickly and easily track the bang:

The Most Popular Hour displays a tally of page views for each hour of the day. You can quickly see if a television or radio ad generated clicks, but the report can also help you determine when announcing a big sale or contest might have the most impact.

The Most Popular Day report works kind of the same way. You can plan to perform updates for the days that receive the least traffic, to impact the fewest customers.

Plus, you can set up a scheduled report that emails these details directly to your inbox to get the info quicker. Check out Working with a Scheduled Report in Site Analytics for steps to set it up.

• Bandwidth and File Bandwidth reports show how much bandwidth visitors use, and what pages and files are downloaded the most. This info is helpful if you’re considering switching hosting plans or want to determine what pages or files people use most.
• Resource Reports provide information about how visitors use pages or files on the site. For example, Bad Resource Links lists broken links, and Resource Types displays a breakdown of hits per file type.
• The Errors report displays a list of files or pages that have generated errors when visitors accessed them, which is helpful if you want to check for attempts made by hackers (or a vulnerability scanner) to discover vulnerabilities in your site.
• The Popular Hour/Day Reports provide valuable information when you need to track marketing and advertising campaign success. Info from the Hour/Day reports can also help you decide when to perform updates.

Want to learn more about these features? Check out these Help topics:
Report Categories
Real-Time Statistics

If your site uses Flash, you also need to add a short line of code to the Flash OBJECT so the Site Overlays reports can see your site. For more information, check out Why won’t the Site Overlays Reports display for my website?

Log files provide information about a website’s visitors, including page errors, broken links, and bandwidth usage.

If you have Site Analytics and also host your website with us, Site Analytics uses log files to generate your traffic reports. You can view and download a copy of your archived log files directly from the Log Files menu. Having access to the raw log files lets you review and manage your data how you see fit. This also gives you the option to create a backup of your traffic reports on your local machine.

Let’s take a look at an entry in a log file:
66.249.71.117 – - [06/Oct/2011:18:01:45 -0700] “GET www.coolexample.com/Gallery.html HTTP/1.1″ 200 5774 “http://coolexample.com/index” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) “

• 66.249.71.117 — This is visitor’s IP address.
• [06/Oct/2011:18:01:45 -0700] — This is the date and time of the entry. -0700 is the time difference to Greenwich Mean time (Universal Time). This log file was created when the web server was on US Pacific time.
• GET — This is the action. Usually it’ll be GET, POST, or HEAD. GET is the most common – it’s a standard “Gimme that file” request.
• www.coolexample.com/Gallery.html HTTP/1.1 — This is the object of the action. So, retrieve the page coolexample.com/gallery.
• 200 — This is the result of the action. 200 means the task was successful. If you’re interested, W3.org has a complete list of responses.
• 5774 — This is the size of the object in bytes.
• http://coolexample.com/index — This is the referring URL. This particular page was accessed from the home page of coolexample.com.
• Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.5; Windows NT 5.0) — This is the visitor’s browser information.

Site Analytics uses this log file data to create reports inside the application. But, if you want to manage the information differently, it’s there in the log files. We save six months of logs that you can download at any time. Just remember, you need to have your site hosted with us for Site Analytics to access your log files.

Know what to change
Is your site click worthy? Is it even click-able? Site Analytics tells you which pages are getting hits and where your visitors are clicking. You can use this information to find out which pages aren’t being used, and then make changes to the design or content and make the pages more user-friendly.

Use heatmap and site overlay to see exactly where your visitors are clicking. These tools help identify if they are clicking on unintended areas of your site. If that’s the case, add links to these locations and redirect visitors to places you want traffic.

Measure your success
Site Analytics shows you where in the world your visitors are coming from. If you start an advertising campaign, you can use Site Analytics to see where the site traffic is coming from — down to the ZIP code! There simply isn’t a better way to measure advertising effectiveness.

Spend wisely
Site Analytics shows you which search engines people use to get to your site. This means, if you pay for Google® or Yahoo!® advertisements, you can see if they’re really working. You can also see which ads might be slacking in effort. For example, if you use Google AdWords advertising and you aren’t getting a lot of hits, you might need to refine your search terms.

By looking at stats, you can tell which types of marketing campaigns get the most hits to your site. For instance, if you run television ads and don’t get many hits, but then run a radio add and get tons of traffic, you can assume that most of your customers listen to the radio. Therefore, you can do more ads on the radio and save money in the process.

Dissect your visitors
Not physically. We’re talking about analyzing your target audience. Use Site Analytics to learn more about your site’s visitors. The reporting tools show who, what, when and where — sometimes even why. Use information to hone in on visitor preferences and characteristics. For instance, if the average site visit lasts only 15 seconds, then more focus needs to be placed on keeping visitors glued to your site.

Think about how insightful it would be to actively watch your site’s visitors navigate through your Web pages. Real-time stats can help you identify what you’re doing right on your website — and where you need to make changes.

Launching a new advertising campaign? Use Site Analytics to determine if your marketing efforts are giving you the proper return on the investment. Plus, you can stay in-the-know with traffic information that updates instantaneously.

And if you’re a visual person, there are plenty of features to help you “see” how well your site’s performing. Heat Map overlay shows you where visitors click on your site. Pin Point overlay identifies the traffic each link on your site generates.

Check out what real-time stats can do for you:

• See where visitors are clicking — and not clicking — on your site with Heat Map overlay:
• Identify at-a-glance the popular links on your Web pages with Pin Point overlay:
• See what your visitors are looking at, right now, click by click:

Don’t worry. This is easy to fix. Click here for more information.

Email scheduled reports of your website traffic statistics to yourself and your business stakeholders. Customize reports to include visitor information, page traffic flow, referrer information, and Heat Map functionality. There are more than 25 report options to pick from!

You choose how often, and at what time the email is scheduled for delivery.

Site Analytics works with Quick Shopping Cart®, WebSite Tonight®, Dedicated and Virtual Dedicated servers, Shared Hosting, and websites hosted by other companies. Click here to learn more.

When you have a hosting account with Go Daddy, you are eligible to receive free statistics. Should you decide the free statistics do not provide enough information, you can sign up for our premium statistics package, Site Analytics. And we hope you do.

In situations when there is at least one full day between the time you started getting traffic on your hosted website and when you signed up for Site Analytics, the free statistics data is used when your Site Analytics account is set up. Then, this additional data is made available through our History Reports.

For example, if you set up your hosting account and start getting traffic on 01/01/10, and then set up a Site Analytics account on 01/06/10, your Site Analytics account will have History reports for data between the dates of 01/01/10 and 01/05/10.

If, on the other hand, you set up your Hosting account and your Site Analytics account on the same day, you will not have any History data and therefore will not see the History report category.

There is another way that you might have History report data, even if you did not initially have any History data, as explained above, when you set up your Site Analytics account. This situation has to do with our Data Retention practices. We currently retain reporting statistics for eighteen months. So, what happens to the stats after eighteen months? You guessed it; they become History data and are available through the History reports. Stats over eighteen months old are removed from the regular reports and moved to the History reports, in one week increments.

One thing that some may find confusing is that, for most people, the reports don’t update. If your Site Analytics account is less than eighteen months old, and you have History, the data will not change over time. It is a snapshot of the traffic to your site before you set up your Site Analytics account. Once your Site Analytics account is more than eighteen months old, the History reports are updated with the oldest stats which were once visible in the regular reports, on a weekly basis.

Now, you can fully understand your History Reports, if you have any.