Here a few tips for web-masters and website-owners on how to sort the wheat from the chaff with stats reporting tools such as "Webalizer", "Wusage" and "Urchin". With these reporting tools, it's all about "Visits" or "Sessions" and "Pages":

Visits or Sessions - every visit to your website is counted as a visit or session.

Pages - every time a page is viewed by one of your visitors, it is counted as a page.

Have a look at the ratio of pages to visitors, how many pages do your visitors view on average?

Have a look at the last full month of stats:

"Daily usage" (graph) - You will see spikes or increases in visitors after an event, such as a launch or mass email or announcement. Or maybe from an external event, like another busy site links to your site, or google give you a high ranking, etc.

"Hourly usage" (graph) - when you start to get a lot of visitors this will smooth out to a trend curve and you will see when most of your visitors are logging on to your site. What sort of mood will they be in? What will be happening around them? Are you promoting or detracting from that mood?

"Referrers" - This is a list of all of the sites that link to your site and send (refer) visitors to your site. It is also interesting and encouraging to see who else is linking to your site.

"Search Strings" - These are the search terms that people enter when they are looking for you on Google (and other search engines). You can get some "wrong numbers", but these are great to see what the most popular (successful) keywords for your site.

You can't get any personal information from these stats, like who they are or where they are. You can get an idea of where they are from by analysing the I.P addresses, but not with these stats, you can invest in a more powerful tool like Urchin Tracking Monitor (UTM) if that information is important to you.

Finally, don't forget the old saying, "there are lies, damn lies and statistics", so don't take everything you see in these reports for granted. Sprinkle in some gut feeling and common sense and you will form a mental picture of your typical visitor very quickly. Are they getting what they want?

Adapted from at article from daniel.larsen.net.nz