Being able to see how many visitors my sites receive is one of the biggest motivating factors for me to continue improving my websites.  Some of the stats that I like to look at are the number of visitors, how many pages each view on average, the average time spent on the site, the conversion rate, and how many visitors are new vs. returning.

All of these numbers are interesting by themselves but are much more interesting when compared against the competition.

Based on Google's Benchmarking stats, here are the averages for medium sized websites for a 30 day period, which is the category that most websites fall into:

• 3,722 visits per month
• 48.07% bounce rate (people that don't view a 2nd page)
• 12,164 pages viewed
• 2 minutes and 22 seconds spent on the site per visit
• 3.27 pages viewed per visit
• 62.92% first time visitors

From what I've seen, repeat visitors view many more pages than new visitors, so if your new visit percentage is high, then chances are that your pages viewed per visit is lower than the average.  Also, new visitors bounce much more than repeat visitors.  New visitors are also much more apt to click on your ads, but repeat visitors tend to end up as your subscribers.

How does your site measure up?

If you want to increase the number of visitors to your site, you need links pointing to it.  A very good (and free) place to do that is at ProSpotlight, where you can create a mini website and a blog among other things.  You can easily create 10-15 relevant pages along with links pointing to your website.