Comprehending Website Traffic Terminology
Analyzing traffic can be crucial to the planning and further development of your website. When accessing traffic data, it is important to know what you’re actually looking at. Hit counters such as those built with earlier versions of Microsoft FrontPage can be rather misleading and give you very inflated stats. This counter and others like it only report numbers and make for a poor method of obtaining accurate, detailed website statistics. Even the more comprehensive tools such as AwStats and Webalizer can be a bit much if you don’t know what the terminology means. We will try to clear some of those terms up in this article.
The Hit
A hit is what you get after one of the files from your site is requested and served. This could be an HTML document, image file or an audio track. Pages that contain a lot of elements generally yield a high number of hits. While hits sound good, they are actually of very little importance when it comes to analyzing your traffic.
The Page View
A page view is simply that. Just like the hit, it does not really give you a good indication of how many different visitors are stopping by your site. It is however, an effective way to judge the stickiness of your site, which refers to the site’s ability to retain the interest of visitors. Carefully analyzing page views could go a long in boosting your ad revenues.
The Unique Visitor
The unique visitor area is where your true stats lie, the ones that really count for something. Hence the name, it refers to a visitor that has a unique IP address, usually visiting the site for the first time on a given day or period. Thus, even if a visitor refreshes or comes in and out of your site multiple times, they will only be counted for once, thus giving you one unique visitor. This is the stat that will actually tell you how many people are visiting your site per day, per week and per month, providing a much more accurate way to analyze the performance of your site.
The Referrer
A referrer is not all that difficult to understand. It simply refers to the origins of the visitor to your website such as the last site they visited, the page on that site and many other insightful details. This information can be helpful for your affiliate programs and networking ventures.
Conclusion
Going over and analyzing your website traffic data can be vital to its longevity. Though it may take up a chunk of your time, you will find that this is time well spent. You don’t want to spend too much time on it though. After all, you probably also need to put effort into promotions, networking, checking on links, creating new content and all that fun stuff that goes into maintaining a website. No one ever said that running a website was easy, but it sure can be rewarding when giving it your all.
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1 Response:
# iimiss.com on 18 Dec 2009 at 2:14 pm
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