It's not hard for Webmasters to get bogged down with the daily perusal of site statistics, but according to Ryan Caldwell, focusing on "active" statistics as opposed to "passive" ones can save
time and trouble.
Caldwell advocates monitoring your site's referral logs -- as knowing which blogs, forums and sites deliver the bulk of your traffic will shed light on which of
your marketing efforts (from blog and discussion group commenting, to contextual ads) are having the greatest impact.
He also notes that using programs like pMetrics to monitor site traffic in real time can reveal trends like "time of day" and "day of week" traffic surges -- and allow you to set your new content seeding or campaign launch schedule accordingly.