Web stats. Site statistics. Don't run away... you need to read this! The very thought of deciphering site statistic programs sends many site owners running to do all kinds of tasks that are less painful and tedious, like going to the dentist or cleaning the tile grout with a toothbrush.

If you know what you are looking for, site stats are not that painful and can be a real motivator to improve performance. They are the scoreboard that allows you to benchmark your performance and challenge you to find ways to make your site convert at a higher rate; more sales, more signups, more participation.

Let's review some of the basic terminology you will find in most web analytics program and demystify it so that you know what to measure, what to ignore, and what it all means.

Hits

Hits are the most overused and misunderstood measurement in web analytics. In the early days, people would brag about how many hits their website got... today most people know that hits are not a reliable measurement.

A hit is any element called by your browser when it requests a page. A single page may register a single hit or hundreds of hits based o¬n how it has been built. Images, external style sheets, external java scripts, and other elements that require the server to pull a file to build the page register as hits. Since every page has a different number of elements, hits are not a reliable measurement.

Files

A file is a hit that actually returned data from the server. Not all hits return data. Cached elements and errors are examples of hits that are not counted as files. This measurement is not likely to be helpful to you either.

Pages or Page Views

A Page or Page View is a measurement of the pages requested from the server. This is a good measurement to keep up with. You can get a rough idea of the number of pages the average visitor views by dividing this number by the number of visitors.

Page views can give you an idea of whether or not visitors are finding what they need o¬n your site and progressing through it or viewing a single page and leaving.

Sites, Unique Visitors, and Repeat Visitors

Sites and unique visitors increment your visitors by recording their IP address. This gives you an idea of the number of visitors to your site in a given time period. It's not entirely accurate as people visiting your site from the same IP address (such as people o¬n an office network or o¬n dial-up where IP's rotate) will be counted as a single site or visitor.

Repeat visitors simply takes that IP address and compares it to see if the same IP address has visited more than o¬nce. Again, a margin of error for multiple users o¬n the same IP address will skew this number.

Session and Visit Duration

This metric tries to measure the amount of time a user browsed your site. While it seems like a good idea to measure this, it's not a very accurate measurement. People may not be actively browsing your site, but they may have it open. A visit may "time out" at different intervals, and a new session is started for the same visitor.

Page 1 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next