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Understanding Your Web Statistics

From our Winter 2008 e-mail newsletter.

You know the old adage "Lies, damned lies and statistics"? Unlike the adage, web stats don't lie. But they can be a mystery to interpret. Here's a primer.
For those of you hosting with us, you'll find your statistics at www.yourdomain.com/cpanel. You'll need your hosting username and password (and of course, put your own URL between the "www." and ".com"). For those of you not hosting with us, you should consider it (shameless plug, we know). You 'll find your web statistics package at your hosting control panel (instructions are probably at your web host's main site). If you can't find them, call us and we'll help you figure it out.

Hits are defined as the elements of a page (an html page plus six images that make up that page equals seven hits) that are served up by the web server. As you can imagine this is not very useful. Visits track the number of unique IP addresses (a unique visitor) that have requested a page within a specified time frame. But this could also be a spider or robot from a search engine like Google. Page Views track the numbers of times the page is served up. Visits and Page Views, while useful raw data, still aren't enough to really track web site usage, but since the data is easy to come by (your server tracks it automatically) it's still shown on web analytics software.

What about the other things you see in your stats?

Referrers
Keywords
Click Throughs

A good primer is available at Wikipedia, our favorite online encyclopedia, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Hits

In our next issue, we'll cover the next set of web analytics, Page Tagging, and how you can use Google Analytics to track what's happening on your web site. You can sign up for our e-mail newsletter at any time by clicking on the left