Decrypting Website Statistics

So, your web hosting account has a fancy website statistics tracking program. It tracks detailed statistics about visitors and their behavior while visiting your site, to help you manage the effectiveness of your webpage. It sounds great, but you can’t make heads or tails of the wealth of information available to you. All that information may seem overwhelming to you now, but by the end of this article you should have a grasp of what all that information means - and you’ll be able to use it to increase your site’s effectiveness.

The Basics

Hits:

Any time your webpage logs a request for information a hit is recorded. This information can take many forms. For instance, if someone visits your webpage, the request for the html file would be a hit, while each image loaded on that page would also count as a hit. If that user then downloaded an image or a zip file from your site, another hit would be counted. So basically, each piece of information that’s requested from your webpage is counted as a hit. One thing to keep in mind when looking at your website’s hits is that one user can be responsible for many hits.

Pages or Pageviews:

A “Page” is counted any time an HTML page from your webpage is viewed. This can be from a direct request (i.e. www.yourpage.com/content.html ) or an HTML page generated from a script (the resulting page from www.yourpage.com/content.cgi ). This number represents the total number of page views only and does not include other ‘stuff’ like image or audio files loaded with these pages. What is actually constituted as a page varies from server to server. The standard pages are .htm, .html, .cgi, .pl and .php.

Sites or Visits:

This is a count of how many visits your page has received. It’s best to think of this total as “sessions” users spend on your website. A unique visitor accesses your site and a visit is logged. If that visitor requests several more pages, a new visit will not be registered unless a certain period of time has passed where the server has had no communication with that visitor.

Unique Sites or Visits:

In addition to the sites/visits column, there is a list of uniques, which is a list of all the unique visitors that have visited your site (when a visitor who has already visited your site visits it again, only a visit is recorded). However, this is not an accurate count of unique people visiting your site. For instance, any time a dial-up user reconnects to the net, their IP changes. Therefore some of your unique visitors could be the same person.

Bandwidth:

Bandwidth is a measure of how much transfer your site is using. It may be broken down into kilobytes or megabytes. Your hosting account probably comes with so many gigabytes of transfer, so to figure out how close you are to your limit, use these figures:

1024 Kilobytes – 1 Megabyte and 1024 Megabytes = 1 Gigabyte.

Note: Web stat programs don’t usually doesn’t track other things (like POP3 and FTP traffic) that are often included in your bandwidth allowance. It’s best to check your control panel or contact your host for an exact figure.

Advanced Website Statistics

Now that we’ve covered the basics that are common to the most popular website statistic programs, you should be able to learn all sorts of interesting information about the traffic on your site. Most programs will break this information down many different ways, by day and even by hour. The detailed breakdown should allow you to learn a lot of basic information about your site’s visitors. However, that information is not always useful. Now we’ll look at some of the more important statistics that can actually help you determine the effectiveness of your website. Please note: not all web stats programs track all of the features listed below.

Visit Duration:

Some web stats programs will track how long your site’s visitors stay on the page. This can help you determine the effectiveness of your index page. For instance, if the majority of your visitors are staying for less than thirty seconds, then perhaps your index page should be tweaked to convince more of your visitors to stay longer.

Pages Visited:

If your stats program tracks the number of times different pages on your website are visited, you’ll be able to gauge the effectiveness of your website design from a business perspective. If the majority of your traffic is only visiting your index page and then leaving, you may want to redesign it to convince your visitors to explore your site more (if you are buying a lot of “junk traffic”, then there’s probably not much you’ll be able to do to get most of your visitors to spend more time on your site).

Search engine stats and referral pages:

Chances are your program will have a section that tracks where incoming visitors from your website are coming from. If it says something like “direct request” or “direct access”, this means your URL was typed into the address bar of a browser or visited from a bookmark. If an address to another page is listed, that means someone came to your site from a link on that page. You can use this to track the effectiveness of advertising campaigns on other websites. Any search engine links will have the keywords used to find your page listed, and this can help you plan and evaluate your search engine optimization strategy if you have one.

Error Codes

Finally, the error codes section is also quite significant. The most important error code is the 404; you may have some mistakes in your webpage causing people to visit a link to a nonexistent page, and the 404 error codes section will help you identify these problems and correct them.