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What Do Your Web "Stats" Mean?
Your web hosting provider should offer you "Usage Statistics" or "Web Stats" with your account. These statistics are an invaluable resource when it comes to gauging if all of your marketing efforts are paying off in visitors to your website. A good statistics program will offer you the following information:
* Number of unique user sessions - This is s a measurement of one person's time and activity on your site and the most accurate way to gauge how many times your site has been visited.
* User sessions per day - This is the daily measurement of how many unique visitors came to your site, what time of day they were coming most, etc.
* Average amount of time spent on site per user - This enables you to tell how effective your site is at holding a visitors attention span.
* Number of page views, broken down by page - Page views are how many times a page is loaded and presented to a viewer. The same viewer can view the same page multiple times, so this is not as accurate as the unique user sessions number.
* Most popular pages - This is helpful in determining which pages your visitors view the most.
* Top paths through site - This is a virtual "map" of which pages your visitors will view in their session.
* Top Entrance page - Surprisingly, this is not always your home page! By checking this
statistic, you can tell if certain pages seem to have more interest or external links to them than others.
* Top Exit page - It is also helpful to know what the most popular pages are when a visitor decides to end their session.
* Top referring urls - This is quite helpful to see which websites are driving traffic to your website the most.
* Most popular keywords/key phrases - Another great resource is learning which keywords visitors are using to find your site.
* Month to month stats - Statistics are usually logged by the month, so that you can compare your traffic from one month to the next.
But What About "Hits"?
"Hits" is a very confusing term used to describe how many times a web page, or an item on a web page has been returned for the user. For instance, your home page has 10 images on it that make up the graphics on the page. A visitor comes in and simply by looking at your home page, a statistics program can log 11 hits (1 for each image returned and 1 for the page itself). It is for this reason that your page "hits" can be a very misleading number. The most accurate representation of how popular your website is will always be "unique users" or "unique visits".
About the Author
Manager and chief designer at Southern California studio, JV Media Design (http://www.jvmediadesign.com)
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