eb sites have highs and lows in terms of visitor statistics. For instance, traffic might spike around the dates of key industry tradeshows and events. It's natural to have more visitors to your Web site after meetings and personally handing out business cards.

A crucial step in gauging the effectiveness of an advertising or marketing campaign is tracking the interest generated. This is much easier to do with Web sites than with traditional methods such as postcards or other demographic studies.

Most hosting companies compile logs or usage statistics for you. If you host the site on your server, it will generate logs containing the time, date, browser, geographical location and often the site visit "referrer."

A referrer is the source of how visitors came to the site. Search engines are the most likely referrers for new traffic, but eventually visitors will type the URL directly into their browser. Most logs and traffic reporting software compile details to track site traffic. One very important difference in the numbers tracked is hits versus visits. It's a bit of a slippery subject but the breakdown is as follows:

• Someone goes to the Web site and the page fully loads. This is registered as one visit.
• If the site has 10 graphics on it (buttons, banners, a page structure that is a placed graphic element) this will register as 10 hits.

Even though the numbers can increase exponentially, a hit is not a number to discount. As people visit a site and click buttons and graphics to navigate through it, search engines index the length of their stay, the navigation's reliability and the site's overall integrity.

Most statistic tracking services will delineate the hits and visits. Monitor them monthly, rather than weekly or daily. The peaks and valleys that often occur with site visits may provide a false sense of the site's true effectiveness. When developing marketing campaigns, product rollouts or press releases, create specific pages on your site for visitors to seek out.

This will help elucidate the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. If your efforts send everyone to the home page, tracking these statistics will be nearly impossible. Instead, point people to a specific page within the site.Another way to drive site visits and hits is to have regularly updated interactive forms and polls and then categorize the results based on the nature of the responses.

When reviewing monthly reports, keep an organized file of them in print so you and your team can review a quarter, six-month or one-year period. Most tracking tools provide the site's administrator with a way to plot increases and decreases on a chart or graph. Use these data to improve your site and build on what drives people to it.

Even if traffic numbers are down, share them with your team; use them as a challenge to overcome. A Web site is a powerful tool. If traffic reports show a paltry response, re-evaluate marketing strategies or provide incentives and training to help staff drive traffic to the site. Poor site design also undermines the possibility of return visitors and search engine optimization.

Think of it as a digital popularity contest; some Web sites are widely liked and some go unnoticed. Make sure your site is one people remember and seek out, and your traffic statistics will thrive.