When analyzing your website statistics you break it down into four categories:
- Visits
- Pages
- Hits
- Bandwidth
Visits
Usually called unique visitors, this is a deduction of how many “people” visited your site. Usually based on IP address and sometimes other factors as well. This is always an estimation since there is no accurate way to measure that. Therefore different stats programs could come up with different numbers using the same log file. I use awstats and another stat program to gauge how many people come to my website.
Example: A visit from User A at IP address X would count as one unique visitor, regardless of how many pages they viewed or how many hits they generated.
Usage: Great metric to estimate the number of unique people that visit your site. Your reach.
Pages
How many pages have been viewed on your website, ignoring embedded images and such.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 1 page view.
Usage: Useful metric to determine how many and what individual pages of your site are being viewed. Helps you guesstimate the number of pages each visitor views each time they come to your website.
Hits
How many objects are loaded up when a visitor comes to your website.
Example: Let’s say your homepage, index.html, has three images on it. When someone visits your homepage, the server will record 4 hits: one for the index.html document, and one for each of the three images it had to fetch to complete the page.
Usage: To see how many objects your server is loading up.
Bandwidth
This shows the amount of data sent from your server
Example: If your homepage is 14k plus 3 images at 12k each, then when a typical user requests that page they’ll pull 50k of bandwidth (14+12+12+12).
Usage: See your bandwidth usage.
Reading the numbers…
Example of everything together
Example of a statistic: 100 unique visitors, 300 visits, 1200 page views, 3600 hits, 2.2GB bandwidth
This means an estimated 100 different people have visited. Those 100 people visited on average 3 times each (300 visits / 100 uniques). During each of those 300 visits, those 100 people viewed an average of 4 pages each (1200 page views / 300 visits). Those 1200 page views generated and average of 3600 hits, or 3 hits per page. All together, 2.2GB of bandwidth was consumed.
2.2GB of bandwidth is a lot for that level of traffic. Unless they are movies, the graphics could be way too big. 3 hits per page view? are images being cached appropriately? Could signal some coding inefficiencies.
The number of visits being higher than the number of uniques is good. Means you have repeat visitors.
4 page views per visitor, how good/bad that is depends on the site. Measures the “stickiness” of your site.
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