Poor television. What a sad, clueless medium. The only way the networks know who is watching what is by educated guesses, computed from a few families with a fancy boxes attached to their sets. These teevee has-beens may have figured out that you turn the channel to FOX news every night but do they know that eight times out of ten, you switch over to CNN after six minutes? Can a television program director pinpoint exactly how long you watched a program much less whether you liked it or not? The television ad salesman sure as hell can’t predict with any accuracy whether or not you intend to buy that new brand of toilet paper, introduced during your top-rated Wednesday night sitcom. Poor old television. You can’t do much of anything except push airwaves out through electrified boxes.

"With wonderful things like server logs and site statistics we web broadcasters can learn details about our audience that television executives would kill to know. We've got user data coming out of our ears and it's dead-on accurate."

Happy Internet. With wonderful things like server logs and site statistics we web broadcasters can learn details about our audience that television executives would kill to know. We’ve got user data coming out of our ears and it’s dead-on accurate. No educated guesses based on surveys of handfuls of people. No pressure on the surfers, just pure unadulterated data on every single person that visits a website. Beat that, TV!

It’s really quite amazing the amount of information one can gather by analyzing web site logs and statistics software. When was the last time you looked past the hits and uniques and peered deeper into those numbers and records?

For instance, web logs will tell you the countries your traffic emanates from. How about that large percentage of French hits? With your traffic stats, you can determine the intent of these French surfers by inspecting how long they remain on the site and whether or not they’re clicking on your ad banners. If you notice that a lot of them are even taking your paysite tour, it might be time to rethink your payment options and language preferences. A lot of people in the world don’t use credit cards and they just might like your site better if you provided it in a format they can read.

Or maybe your free site is getting a lot of repeat traffic, bookmarkers even. Follow the bookmarkers by their logs. Find out what keeps them coming back and work on ways to make that obsession pay. Do you host a gallery that gets more hits than the others? Take whatever magic is in that gallery and repeat it on your site. Try to massage the ad placement on that popular page so your marketing is more alluring. With server logs and site statistics, you can cull the winners from any page, any picture or any sponsor link.

Website demographics also tell you where the losers are. Your raw hits tell you that today; your page received one thousand visitors. However, a more thorough examination indicates that five hundred of those hits came from foreign-based IP addresses that only stay an average of 15 seconds on your site. From this you can deduce that someone in another country is hit-botting your site. You need to take security measures and block them from accessing your domain. Or worse, some goon two towns over from you is hotlinking one of your images on his stupid blog. You could drive two town over and beat the shit out of him (Some stat software is that good!) or you could simply watermark the image with your URL and boom, you have free advertising. Weed out useless traffic. Block malicious bandwidth thieves. You can use your humble server logs to fight evil and save the day.

Poor Television.

In the future all our television sets will be computers, connected to the web. When that happens, the television executives, program directors and ad buyers of old might still be around, if we Internet punks haven’t put them out of their jobs. If they do make it, they too can enjoy the beauty of accurate, absolute site statistics. We’ll all have cookies and laugh about the days when men in expensive suits, decided their fortunes by educated guesses. We’ll drink brandy out of crystal snifters and light our cigars with burning pages from out-of-print magazines like Time and Newsweek.

Study your server logs and site statistics. Study them as if they were maps to a promised land, which in fact, they are.