Web site statistics

[remi]

If you owns a web site, you are perhaps interested in the success of your site. Your Web hoster offers Web site statistics, to give you indicators about who, when and how a web server is visited. The only problem is: you have to interpret the statistic in the right way.

In a web site statistic you'll find the following values:

• Hits - The number of requests from all your visitors to your webserver. It's important to understand, that this value is extremly misleading and it's not really important, because this value depends on your HTML code. If you create a simple HTML page without images, stylesheets, javascript or something else, the Browser needs only one Request to load your page. But if you create a more complex HTML page, the Browser needs a Request for each object on your page. Therefore it could be possible that your statistic shows 1,000,000 hits, but only 1,000 visits.
• Page Views - The number of pages delivered from your webserver. The Web analytics software counts only the number of delivered HTML/PHP/Perl/JSP/ASP pages and not the necessary graphic/javascript/stylesheet files. If you look at this value and on the number of visits on your web site, you're able to calculate the average number of viewed pages per visit.
• Visits - The number of visits from uniquely identified clients. This is the most interesting value, in order to judge the popularity of a web site.

There are still further interesting aspects to the topic, which are discussed in the Wikipedia article "Web analytics".

Regards,
Remi

[parahandy]

Thank you Remi that makes it a bit clearer
Norman

[remi]

You're welcome, Norman

[stlewis]

Just a comment on Visits... Some tools show Visits and Unique Visits. Visits is the total (so a re-visit is another) but Uniques is usually only within a certain period (I think 24 hours) - because many ISPs do not give customers a permanent unique IP address. Thus 215.123.54.78 may be Fred Bloggs on 6th September and Jane Brown on 7th.

[costy81gl]

Thanks
Now can find out how many people visited my site.

[AntonyF]

Hits - The number of requests from all your visitors to your webserver. It's important to understand, that this value is extremly misleading and it's not really important

Funnily enough I was just having a rant about this today. On the Dragons' Den last night (a TV program where investors invest in businesses) they were going koo-koo over a site that got "50 thousand hits". Not only was I annoyed that no one questioned him on whether he meant hits or not (because so many people use hits to mean impressions/visitors) but they didn't ask him over what time period! The sites I manage get 50k visitors a day, so I'm not sure why they were getting all excited by this vague statement on the show of "50 thousand hits".

Page Views

The only thing I'd add there is aka "impressions".