How Often Do Your Check Your Stats?

One of the phases that virtually any new webmaster goes through is the stats-fever. It’s that period when you first discover Webalizer of (hopefully) Google Analytics, and you are so excited with your website and with your new visitors that you feel the urge to check the stats every day. Sometimes multiple times a day. Sometimes multiple times an hour.

After a while, however, you realize that checking the stats so frequently is not a really good use of your time. After all daily fluctuations are bound to happen, you can’t conclude much about them. More importantly, instead of checking the stats you could be doing something that has a chance of actually bringing new visitors, like writing a new post or promoting the website on social networks.

That’s when you start checking the numbers less frequently. What would the ideal frequency be, however?

In my opinion there’s no ideal, as each website will have its own characteristics. That being said, I think checking the numbers on a monthly basis is the bare minimum.

Sure, you can take a quick look on a weekly basis to make sure everything is running smoothly, but the deeper analysis to understand whether or not your strategies are working should be done on a month by month basis in my opinion.

Some websites will need an even larger time frame. Some friends of mine run a website about an event that takes place once a year, so during some months their traffic will sky rocket. As a result they tend to use yearly numbers when analyzing their performance.

What about you? How often do your check your stats and what time frames do you use to do your reviews and analysis?