What happens when you build a personal website and then spend a week promoting it? Well, you hopefully get some traffic. In my case, I got about 2,000 unique visitors to www.davidspark.com in the first five weeks. Most people discover how many visitors they get by adding a counter to their site. But a counter won't tell you where these people are coming from, where they're going, or how long they stay. A Web analyzer will.

Also known as a log file analyzer, the Web analyzer takes data in your log file-- the server-generated file that tracks every single click-- and then compiles it into a valuable report about user activity.

After browsing my report, I came upon two important realizations:

1. Beyond word of mouth, Web reviews and awards are the best way to attract customers to your site.
2. My start page (index.html) definitely needs restructuring. Users are not visiting the places I want them to go.

These stats are from the Web traffic report for www.davidspark.com generated by WebTrends. Many of the pages only make sense to me, because I know my own site, but I'll step you through my analysis of www.davidspark.com to give you an idea of what you'll discover when you finally analyze your own site.