What Do Your Web "Stats" Mean?
Your web hosting provider should offer you "Usage Statistics"
or "Web Stats" with your account. These statistics are an
invaluable resource when it comes to gauging if all of your
marketing efforts are paying off in visitors to your website. A
good statistics program will offer you the following information:
* Number of unique user sessions - This is s a measurement of
one person's time and activity on your site and the most
accurate way to gauge how many times your site has been visited.
* User sessions per day - This is the daily measurement of how
many unique visitors came to your site, what time of day they
were coming most, etc. * Average amount of time spent on site
per user - This enables you to tell how effective your site is
at holding a visitors attention span. * Number of page views,
broken down by page - Page views are how many times a page is
loaded and presented to a viewer. The same viewer can view the
same page multiple times, so this is not as accurate as the
unique user sessions number. * Most popular pages - This is
helpful in determining which pages your visitors view the most.
* Top paths through site - This is a virtual "map" of which
pages your visitors will view in their session. * Top Entrance
page - Surprisingly, this is not always your home page! By
checking this statistic, you can tell if certain pages seem to
have more interest or external links to them than others. * Top
Exit page - It is also helpful to know what the most popular
pages are when a visitor decides to end their session. * Top
referring urls - This is quite helpful to see which websites are
driving traffic to your website the most. * Most popular
keywords/key phrases - Another great resource is learning which
keywords visitors are using to find your site. * Month to month
stats - Statistics are usually logged by the month, so that you
can compare your traffic from one month to the next.
But What About "Hits"?
"Hits" is a very confusing term used to describe how many times
a web page, or an item on a web page has been returned for the
user. For instance, your home page has 10 images on it that make
up the graphics on the page. A visitor comes in and simply by
looking at your home page, a statistics program can log 11 hits
(1 for each image returned and 1 for the page itself). It is for
this reason that your page "hits" can be a very misleading
number. The most accurate representation of how popular your
website is will always be "unique users" or "unique visits".