First of the Month

The first day of the month is a good day to check your monthly web site statistics! Why, you ask? Surely, there’s nothing valuable to be had from the scant results that will appear there unless you have an incredibly busy site.

Well, for anyone without access to daily analytics of some sort, the kind that come from Clicky or Google Analytics, the first few days of the month reveal some of the more peculiar keywords and referrers that are hitting your site. Such long tail referrals eventually become swamped over the course of the month as the more common keywords accumulate in your logs. Some logging software actually truncates your view of your referrals saving (beyond the raw files), the top 100 hits. This means that as the month moves on, some of the more esoteric long-tail searches will be lost to view.

If your logs suffer from this effect and you’re not in a daily analytics scheme, then today’s the day to take a close look and pull on the long tail.