Decoding Stats!
  Written By Titmowse

Statistics. It's an almost clinical sounding word. Its general definition is even colder:

1 : a branch of mathematics dealing with the collection, analysis, interpretation, and presentation of masses of numerical data.

2 : a collection of quantitative data.

For the adult webmaster the words statistics, stats, these words provoke emotion, reaction and action. Statistical reports on our sites inform us of our income; our popularity and some of us get obsessed with them. The new adult webmaster checks their stats on a moment-to-moment basis. After a point they slack off and some will even stop checking them almost completely. Our site stats and our sales stats are the webmaster’s way to assess the success of our efforts. They boggle the novice. They intrigue and inform the knowledgeable. Stats bring about feelings of elation and anger, confusion and revelation. Content may be king but it’s all about the stats baby.

What are stats? It’s okay if you don’t know. Even when you do know, the first few times you check them, they probably won’t make sense anyway. A cool thing about the Internet is that business/visitor traffic can be precisely tallied. Television and radio advertisers have to assess their viewership based on probabilities and focus groups. Nielson puts only so many boxes in so many households. They come to their ratings conclusions based on a small portion of the populace. In other words everything about television programming is dependent upon the viewing habits of a few thousand people. Website statistics are infinitely more accurate. Server stats tell exactly how many visitors hit the site, how many of them are first-time visitors, what countries they’re from, what browsers they used and what pages they looked at. Site stats track customers in a way never before seen and with a correctness never before experienced.

There are a few different ways to obtain site statistics. The most common way is the site counter. You can write your own counter code or you can get one of the many free counter services available to the adult webmaster. Sex List is a very popular counter service just for adult sites. When you sign up for a Sex List account, you receive a personalized HTML code to place on your web page. That code (usually a cookie) will give you statistics on traffic amounts, country locations, search terms used to find your site and a lot of other great details. If you have a virtual hosting account, one of the features of your hosting plan is your ability to log into the server logs of your site. There you also will find traffic information much like the counter code. When you become affiliated with an adult sponsor program, they too will assign you a code to apply to your page. That code tracks banner clicks, unique visitors, the pages where sales are made from and (of course) how much money you’ve made.

Initially, the first important statistic a webmaster wants to see is the hit count. It’s important to have a lot of visitors, as this business is numbers game. The more visits the higher the chances you will sell. The more traffic, the more attractive your page is for trading links with other webmasters. . After a point, you begin to discern the deeper significance of other statistical data besides the basic hit count. You’ll know from stats if your visitors are leaving as soon as they see your main page or if they venture deeper. You’ll discover if the search engines have picked you up from referrer info. You’ll see just what keywords get you exposure from your search term statistics. You’ll find out from sales stats what banners work, what page has the most effective sales text by looking at referring URLs. Stats will show you what sites are sending you hits and what links lists are working for you.

With that kind of information, you make a better web page. You improve upon what works and repeat the process for other pages and other sites. Stats give you so much it’s no wonder some webmasters spend hours and hours checking and comparing them. Site/sales statistics give the adult webmaster a tool that in the real world used to be done by a hired team. Look at your stats. Understand your stats. Make your stats work for you.