Explaining Your Web Statistics

“What's the difference between a visitor and a hit?” and other questions

As part of the web hosting that we provide, there is a statistics package that gives you a lot of information about the visitors to your website. I have been asked in the past to explain some of data shown and hopefully this article will help give you a better understanding of the data and what it means for your website.

What's the difference between a visitor and a hit?

To answer this question, we need to understand the four main visitor statistics. They are: Unique visitors, Number of visits, Pages and Hits. I'll explain what each of these actually mean and hence show what you should pay most attention to.

• Each unique visitor represents an individual who has come to your site. If a visitor comes to your site ten times in a day, they should only be recorded once. Hence, this is a good indicator of how popular your website is.
• The number of visits records every visit made to your site, so in the above example the number of visits would be ten.
• The pages statistics records the number of pages viewed by visitors.
• The hits figure is a record of every file requested by a visitor to your website. This includes pages, images and other files. For example, if your website has lots of images, then each image will be recorded as a hit. Consequently, the number of hits your website receives has very little to do with how popular it is and can be ignored.

The number of visits as a ratio of unique visitors gives a good indication of the number of repeat visitors. Repeat visitors are important, since a high number shows that people find your website interesting and will return to it again. The opposite highlights that even though people find your website, they don't find enough to interest them to make them want to return. The answer to this is to regularly add some new content that will hopefully persuade them to visit your website in the future.

A high ratio of pages to number of visits indicates that when people come to you website they look at a number of pages, which hopefully means they are intersted in what you have on offer. A low ratio would imply that the first page they see, which is probably the home page, does not engage them and they do not look any further. If this is the case, then you need to improve this first impression.

What do visitors to my website look at?

By looking at the figures that show how long people spend at your website and what pages they look at, you should get a good picture of how well your website is doing.

The Visits duration statistic shows how long people spend at your website. The aim is to try and reduce the number of visitors that spend less than 30 seconds at your website. The Pages-URL (Top 10) statistic shows which pages visitors arrive at and leave from. Taken together with the visits duration, it gives you the opportunity to target particular pages within your website.

How do visitors get to my website?

The Connect to site from section shows where visitors came from to reach your website. The Direct address / Bookmarks figure is the number of people who typed your address into their browser or who have your site bookmarked. These can be considered your regular, loyal visitors. The Links from an Internet Search Engine part shows the visitors who found you via a search engine (usually Google). These are likely to be new visitors. This is a good one to keep an eye on if you are trying to optimise your website using SEO strategies or by using a tool such as Google AdWords. The other important section is Links from an external page (other web sites except search engines). If you have registered your website with web directories and other websites relevant to yours, then you can see here how successful they are in attracting visitors.

The Search Keyphrases (Top 10) and Search Keywords (Top 10) statistics may be helpful when considering what keyphrases to use within the content of your website.