Know your audience.  We all have one thing in common – we all build web sites and most of us don’t know a single thing about the people who surf the web and inevitably our web site.

Well – until now.  Did you know that you can activate a statistics feature for your WST account?  Here are some real world findings that you too can find out by simply activating your statistics feature within your WST hosting account.

Step 1) Log into your account and instead of clicking on “Launch”, click on “Open”.


Step 2) In the resulting Hosting Control Center page, click on “Web Statistics” towards the bottom and then click on “Configure Web Statistics”.


Step 3) Checkmark the box next to “Enable Web Statistics” and your hosting account will start tracking traffic on your site!


Now since it will take some time for you to see some statistics from your pages, I’ll share with you some of my stats.  5’9”, unmarried, male

So I have several web sites and I run statistics on two in particular.  “Site A” receives over 500 hits a day and “Site B” receives only a couple hundred and I was really surprised to see the differences in site visitor demographics simply because of the content of the site.

Here is 3 months of data from Site B that gets a couple hundred hits a day.  It’s nothing special and I know the general demographic of my site visitors so I would say the Windows:Mac ratio is the industry norm.  Notice how the percentage of Mac users surfing this web site is roughly 5%.



Now keep that 5% of Mac usage from Site B in mind and look at the chart below that was pulled from Site A over the course of 2 weeks.  The number of pages is roughly one-third yet the number of Macintosh users barely flinched. 

Calculate the percentages and you’ll notice that Mac usage tripled to 15%!  Although I don’t consider myself an activist (or even physically active really), I happen to know for a fact that Site A is popular with activists promoting consumer awareness due to the nature of the referring links to Site A.



Now naturally there may be other factors that play a part in deciding what computer someone may use and what sites they will surf but one can almost safely extrapolate that people who are more vocal about changing their environment are more likely to use a Mac.  But that doesn’t tell us why they chose a Mac– maybe it’s because they dislike a PC or they like the perceived “cool” factor of a Mac and they want to impress others – we don’t know.  But we DO know what perks their interests and now you can tweak your content to fit the interests of your audience.

As G.I. Joe said in the early 80s, “…knowing is half the battle”.