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Understanding what your site statistics mean

It’s all well and good to set up a statistics program on your site, but what do the numbers mean?

Visits, Returning Visits, and Unique Visits

When a person views a page on your site, that counts as a visit. The visit will continue as long as the person is active on your site. After a period of inactivity, the statistics program considers the visit over. If the same person views another page at that point, it counts as a returning visit—that means the person has visited the site before, but this is a new day. Unique visits count only the individual people who visit your site; they don’t count returning visits.

So if I visit your site three times in one week and Bob visits it twice, you will have five total visits, I will have three returning visits, and you will have two unique visitors (Bob and I).

A high rate of returning visits means you have a captive audience of people who come back repeatedly to view your site.

Page Views and Hits

Each time someone views a page on your site, it counts as a page view. Each time a person’s visit causes their browser to access a file, it counts as a hit. Typically, you will have many, many more hits than page views. Generally, you can ignore the hits statistics—it counts everything from the page HTML, the sytlesheet, images viewed, javascript files, and any other file on your site that a visitor uses. Sites can have massive numbers of hits simply due to the way they are designed.

If you are trying to find out how many pages people viewed, stick to the page views. This is also the number advertisers are interested in.

Referrers

If someone accesses your site by clicking a link on another site, the other site will show up in your statistics as a referrer. You can use the referrer information to discover who is linking to you. If you have a sudden jump in the number of links coming from a particular site, it’s probably because they posted some sort of article or information about you on their pages. Referrers are a useful way of finding out who thinks you are worth linking to and who might be writing about you.

You should be aware that there is such as thing as “referrer spam”; these are sites that link to you in order to get their site visited. They are primarily hoping your statistics are public, so that anyone can view them. If they are, by getting their link in your statistics, they may receive a marginal boost in their search engine rankings and anyone who views your statistics may be curious enough to visit their site, increasing their traffic. If your statistics are private, they can still hope that you will be curious enough about this unfamiliar URL to visit their site.

Be cautious about visiting unfamiliar sites you see in your site statistics. Do a quick search in your favorite search engine to see if they are legitimate.

Search Engine Traffic

You will also have traffic incoming from search engines. When a visitor finds your site via a search engine, your statistics program will often be able to determine what keywords they used. This helps you find out what search terms send a lot of visitors your way. Beware that you can get some unexpected results—people visiting on keywords you never would have expected, or people searching for X-rated keywords.

Understanding what keywords people use to find your site is the first step to customizing your site to get the results you want. For example, I want people searching for “horse blogs” to find this site, but for a long time the only incoming keywords were “horse bloggers.” Realizing I was not getting incoming traffic based on my ideal keywords, I was able to make changes to my site in order to encourage higher rankings in the search engines for “horse blogs.”

Visit Length

The visit length tells you how long people were on your site. It’s a little misleading, however, since tracking programs are not all-knowing. The programs track each time a page loads, but they cannot necessarily tell where a visitor goes after it leaves a page—or when exactly a visitor leaves. Visit lengths are best guesses, and you should take them with a grain of salt. However, you can use visit length to give you a general idea of how long people are staying. The longer they are on your site the better, of course, because it means they are reading your content.

More information on statistics

You can get more information about what your site’s statistics mean by reading the help documentation of your statistics program. The help files should give you detailed information about how that program determines the various statistics, which will help you better understand what the data means.

June 01, 2008 Statistics and Traffic

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