Basic Website Statistics

Basic website statistics are something you need to pay attention to. These are broken down into six easy categories that can make your website owning experience confusing and frustrating. Web stats refer to the use of the data collected to determine which pages are generating the most traffic and sales.

Hits

What are hits? A hit is a person visiting your website. Hits are counted using a hit counter that you can have either visible or invisible on your site. These counters come in all shapes, sizes, colours, fonts, and designs.

There are drawbacks to hit counters - they tell you how many people have visited your site up to that point. A single web page has many discrete files and each one is considered a hit while the page downloads for the viewer. The number of hits is really an arbitrary number that is grossly misleading and exaggerated. While you could do a little bit of math and determine an average per day and per week of how many hits you get, an accurate count is sometimes a great thing. The total number of visitors or page views is a more accurate count of hits.

Page Views

This is a better tracking unit than the hit counter. Every time a page is viewed by a user, it leaves an impression. This impression is what a page view counter tracks. If a returning user views that page again, it leaves another impression. A banner or other advertisement is also considered an impression.

Again, there are drawbacks. It is not an accurate count of how many visitors there are to your site as a person can go back and review another page here and there while still on your site. Each time this leaves an impression on the page, and it is counted. So if your visitor is looking for something in particular, each page they visit more than once receives more than one impression, and those impressions are counted.

Visits

This is the best tracking system. This tells you how many visits to your site you have had in one day. Generally, a visit is considered one person, and it is assumed that the one person will visit more than one page, and thus creating more impressions or page views is expected. It is broken down into thirty minute intervals as well as how many page requests they made. This is a great way to determine how many visitors you get, how long they stay, and how often they return. This is a great tool to determine how wide your audience is.

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors are determined by IP address, domain name, or cookie. Many say that this is the number that counts. A unique visitor may visit more than once, but because it is that same person, it is only counted once. The mandatory metric for ABCe audits is solely the unique visitor.

Referrals

These are the number of people who are referred by another website or search engine. This number can tell you what advertising you have out is working and what is not. Referrals can be repeat visitors or new visitors. Often times, they are both.

Keep in mind that often a referral can also be someone who goes directly to your site from the start. They may have heard about your site from a television ad, friend, newspaper ad, or other reference.

Search Strings

Pay attention to search strings. This is the phrase that visitors use to find your site in a search engine. You can use these to focus your ads and other marketing methods to generate hits to your site. They are also useful in what does not appear there. If the keywords you have been targeting do not show up in your statistics, that should raise a red flag and cause an investigation to determine the reason.

Search strings, or keywords as they are also known, are important. They are the words that rate your site in search engines. The higher your site sits in the rankings of search engines, the higher the chances that someone will click on your site and visit it. This is because the majority of people do not scroll down to see the sites that are lower in the list because they are not as relevant in their search as the ones higher up.

Often times people complain about a website leaving cookies on their computer. There is a privacy concern with cookies that leave many users cold. A cookie is many things. It identifies users who have been to a website before. Cookies are supposed to help load the page faster and identify unique visitors. When people delete their stash of cookies, it throws off the statistics. However, due to the privacy concerns, people have been blocking or deleting cookies, first or third party.

One misconception about new visitors and repeat visitors is that it does not total all visitors. This is because, when looking at visitors as individuals, a new visitor who visits the site again is considered a new visitor and a returning one. When viewed as an individual, the question is "Are they a new visitor or a repeat?" The answer is both. The metric will have the same number of new visitors and repeat visitors, but they will never add up to all visitors, and those who specialize in the metrics of the whole gambit understand and accept that.

Another common problem is called the "Hotel Problem." Unique visitors each day do not add up at the end of the month. If a person stays in a hotel room for two nights, they are considered two unique visitors, but there was only one guest. The same holds true if three people stay in a hotel, two nights each, different rooms. Three people, but six unique visitors. At the end of the month, you cannot even divide the monthly total by two, because there are too many variables.

It is certainly worth the effort to take the time to understand your statistics. You will start to identify patterns and behaviours as you become more adept at deciphering your web stats. This knowledge can fine tune your site and help you better understand your customers.