What You Web Host Didn't Tell You About Web Stats -
by Greg Burton
http://www.web1stop.com
Do you analyze your your web statistics? They can be
invaluable in many ways. The trick is to understand what
the data is, and how to interpret it.
You will get basic web traffic information from most
hosting companies. The "raw" data - where the statistics
come from - are your server logs. Basically, your webserver
writes a line in at least one file whenever it performs an
action. There will be a line each time the host serves
something. At this point, it's pretty raw - and the
information isn't usable. We make it understandable with a
program called a log analyzer.
There are a variety of log analyzers, but they basically
come in two flavors - a script on your website, or a
program on your computer. Almost every hosting company
provides a script - you probably have a url for yours. Some
scripts are more powerful than others - so in some cases you
may want to install a log analyzer on your own computer.
It's fairly simple - and we'll go over some examples in a
later article.
You've probably heard a friend talking about how many
"hits" their website gets. Hit's don't matter, because
the don't measure traffic. Basically hits are just the
files served from your website. Every graphic file on every
viewed page is counted as a hit. Say you have 12 images on
your web page. When someone visits it, the log will show 12
hits. It was just one visitor looking at one page. So don't
think of traffic as being about hits.
The figures you want to work with are a bit different.
There are three basic building blocks for meaningful
statistics - unique visitors, visits, and page views. Your
traffic analysis starts with these.
Page views are the number of pages looked at on the site
for a period of time. Visits are the number of times people
come to your site. And unique visitors are exactly what it
says - the number of unique visitors you've gotten
Suppose that only one person has visited your website, and
only once. She views 3 pages. Your stats program might look
something like this:
Pages Visits Unique Hits
3 1 1 16
Then he comes back the next day and looks at the same two
pages. Then you would see:
Pages Visits Unique Hits
4 2 1 20
So each visit can have more than one page view, and each
unique visitor can have more than one visit.
In our next installment, we'll examine these numbers in
more detail. We'll begin to see the valuable information
they reveal.
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