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Understanding Web Statistics Can Increase The Bottom Line

One of the most important Web site statistics is often the one most frequently misread by Web site owners and unwary webmasters. If you're not careful, confusing "Hits" and "Visits" can send you down the wrong road with your marketing efforts. A hit is an inquiry from a machine and a visit is an inquiry from a human. The difference is huge.

So why do you get hits?

One example of a hit is a request for information from a search engine. This is how Google stores or caches information for image and video searches.

Go to Google images (http://images.google.com) and enter the search term "arrows."
(http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=arrows).

All the arrow graphics displayed are the result of Google having (hit) a Web site and recording the information.

There are ways of asking or preventing search engines from gathering data by using special Meta tags. Some that are commonly used are:

If you write in ASP and want the same non-cache effect, here's the header information:

< % Response.CacheControl = "no-cache" %>>
< % Response.AddHeader "Pragma", "no-cache" %>
< % Response.Expires = -1 %>

In addition, Netscape suggests the following JavaScript be used in the BODY tag of all pages that should not be cached:

onLoad="if ('Navigator' == navigator.appName) document.forms[0].reset();"

So Visits are better?

It’s not that one is better than the other. After all, increased hits and visits means you're getting the attention of other Web sites, search engines and people. The number of visits is the total number of visits by all visitors over a given period of time. If I visit your site and come back four more times, you should see one Unique visit and 5 visits from me.

Sometimes a hit occurs as the result of a human visit. These are the files requested by your visitor including pages and images. If you have a page with four images calling a Java Script file, the page will generate a total of six hits.

So what good are Web stats?

Bragging about ones’ Web stats does not do much good unless your phone is ringing off the hook or your inbox is filled with new business. But it really depends on what you're looking for and what you want to accomplish.

A quick review of my Web stats show me some very useful marketing information such as:

10 Most viewed pages
View commonly used search terms resulting in a visit to my site.
Drops and peaks in traffic over the year.

Let's presume you posted a page offering a free download. It would be helpful to see how many times users downloaded this file to judge the demand or popularity of what your offering.

Other Webmasters or Web site owners use Web statistics to determine:

Measure actual load on the server for diagnostics and planning
Tracking of suspicious activity

Web Statistics Glossary

Inclusion - An inclusion is a pre-filter that is used to limit a site's statistics to only specific items of a log file. Inclusions are typically used to restrict a site's statistics to only one subdirectory of a larger parent site.

Keyword - A keyword represents a single word in the search string text used by web users to get to your site.

Last Hit - Last Hit represents the date and time that the visitor was last active on your site

New Visitors - A new visitor represents a visit by a computer that has not yet been to the web site in the time period of the report.

Page - The basic building blocks of any website. A website generally contains a collection of different pages that are accessible and viewable via a web browser. By default, many web statistical programs consider the following extensions to be pages: .ASP, .ASPX, .CFC, .CFM, .CFMX, .CFML, .CGI, .HTM, .HTML, .IDA, .IDC, .JHTM, .JHTML, .JSP, .JWS, .MHT, .MHTML, .MV, .PHP, .PHP3, .PHTM, .PHTML, .PL, .SHTM, .SHTML, .STM, .WML, .XDL, .XHTML, .XML.

Page Views - A page view is a successful request for a file on your web site that is considered to be a page. These usually mean files with extensions such as .txt, .asp, .aspx, .php, etc. Views generated as a result of an error (either a 400 or 500 level error) are not counted as actual views for your site, and are kept separate from successful views.

Phrase - A phrase shows the entire search string text used by web users to get to your site.

Platform - Platform represents the operating system that the web site visitor is using. Some typical platforms are Windows 2003 Server, Windows XP, and Mac OSX.

Rank - Rank indicates the position of the item when ordered

Referrer Host - The Referrer Host represents the web site from which visitors to your site came from. A value of "No Referrer" represents a visitor typing your web site directly into the browser, using a bookmark, or following a link from an email client.

Referrer URL - The Referrer URL represents the exact web page from which visitors to your site came from. A value of "No Referrer" represents a visitor typing your web site directly into the browser, using a bookmark, or following a link from an email client.

Result Code - Result codes are returned by your web server, and indicate whether or not resources were successfully downloaded from your web site. Large numbers of 404 errors, for example, may indicate a problem with your web site links.

Return Visitors - A return visit is counted when a computer that has already been to the site before returns for another visit.

Return Visits - Return visits represent the times when previous visitors come back to the site again. A high percentage of return visits to total visits indicates that your web site is holding visitors' attention.

Search Engine - A search engine is a website whose primary function is providing a search engine for gathering and reporting information available on the Internet or a portion of the Internet

Spider - A spider is an automated program that searches and indexes web sites, usually with the intent of providing information for search engines.

Unique Visitors - A unique visitor represents any number of visits from the same computer. If a person returns to the site again, a visit is counted, but a unique visit is not.

User Agent - The User Agent string is sent by browsers to identify them, the operating system they are running on, and installed browser extensions. There are countless varieties of user agent strings.

Visit Length - The number of seconds that a visit lasts. On reports dealing with visit length, the average visit length is calculated and shown for all visits. Visits length assumes that the visitor stays several seconds after their last hit.

Visits - Visits represent the total number of times people have visited your web site. A visit is counted whenever a web site user requests one or more files from the web server. If the user becomes idle for more than a certain amount of time (usually 20 minutes), a new visit is generated when they come back.

Web Site Path (Path) - When a visitor moves from page to page within a site, they follow, or generate, a specific path for their movement. For example, a visitor enters your site via the Default.asp page, clicks on a link to Product.asp then proceeds to Order.aspx, and they finally leave via Thank_you.htm. Therefore, the path for this visit would look like: default.asp/product.asp/order.aspx/thank_you.htm.

Related Articles;
Researching Your Web Site Popularity

About the Author
Rick Vidallon is President of Visionefx, a Web design company based in Virginia Beach, Va. They provide services to national companies as well as small to medium businesses throughout the United States.
Rick can be reached at (757) 619-6456 or rick@visionefx.net.