Customer FAQ

What do all the Statistics Terms Mean?

Hits
A hit is created when your web server delivers a file to someone's browser. A web page is usually made up of many files. These can include HTML files, photos, background images, Flash movies, ads, and more. So, when someone visits your homepage once, they call up many files and each file is a hit.

How important are hits? Not very. In fact they can be downright misleading. Depending on the way pages are constructed, two identical looking pages can produce vastly different hit counts.

Page Views
Page views are a much better indication of Web site traffic. A single page may consist of any number of hits, but it is still one page that has been viewed.

Pages
A list of the most popular pages viewed. Apart from some occasional bias problems caused for example by spammers looking for contact forms etc, this statistic is a great way to see what pages are popular in your site. This can be an excellent marketing tool in determining your audiences preferences.

Visits
This is one of the more useful metrics. A visit includes all the pages viewed as a visitor navigates around your site.

A Visit begins when a person enters the site and ends when the same visitor leaves the site or remains idle for a period of time (usually 30 minutes).

Importantly though, a single person visiting your site 30 times is counted the same as 30 people visiting once each. So if your site is under development for example, the seemingly fantastic results might actually be coming from you and you web designer!

Unique Visitors
This is a more precise way to measure visitors to your site. Each person visiting your site is counted only once, regardless of how many times they visit. This is a way to measure how wide an audience you are reaching.

Bandwidth
A measure of the data traffic from the web server to browsers. This becomes important if your site becomes so popular that you are reaching the bandwidth threshold and it may be time to consider upgrading to a higher hosting level.

Browser Types and Operating Systems
Unless you have an interest in the relative merits and success of browsers and operating systems, these stats are generally of use to your web designer/developer in gauging the most popular viewing platforms - your site may not look identical in all permutations but it needs to be functional and attractive to all people using all types of systems.

Referrals, Referring Domains etc
A referral is a web page that contains a link to one of your pages that was used by a visitor to get to your site. Some referrals will be from search engines, others will be from web sites that have chosen to link to you.

Understanding how people are finding your site is very important. It can help you understand your market and better budget your marketing dollars. Referrals also help to build up your site's search engine effectiveness.

Search Phrases
A search phrase is the phrase visitors used to find your site in a search engine. Understanding these will help you focus your ads and other marketing methods. Search phrase reports are also useful in what they don’t show. For example, keywords that you have targeted that do not show up in your stats should raise a flag and prompt investigation to determine the cause.

Understanding your statistics is certainly worth the effort. As you get more adept at deciphering Web stats, you will start to identify patterns and behaviors. Use that knowledge to fine tune your site and better understand your customers.

Geographic Info
This is the area that has caused most confusion with our customers, the geographical location of the visitors, a statistic that attempts to break down the visitors by continent.

The short answer is to ignore these stats as they are unreliable...here is the long answer...

Typically the stats package reports around 60% of visitors from an "unknown location" then attempts to break down the other (typically) 40% of visitors by continent.

A common question we then receive is "Why are most of our visitors apparently American?".

After investigating this common trend, we can report that the geographical locating component of the stats package has now been withdrawn by the maker of the stats software and the geographical server that ran the component has also been shutdown.

This was due to the fact that it was becoming increasingly difficult to map IP addresses back to a specific location as worldwide IP blocks are fragmented into smaller blocks of IP addresses.

The reason continent locations may still show is that they may be listed in the stats software itself.

The fact that the geographical data was so inaccurate is one of the reasons the product was withdrawn. The main reason for the inaccuracy was due to technologies such as Network Address Translation (NAT) and CIDR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classless_Inter-Domain_Routing) resulting  in large, easy to define IP blocks being broken up into sections of smaller and smaller pieces that can literally be located anywhere around the world.

Hopefully this article has assisted in the use of your stats package.

Understanding your statistics is certainly worth the effort. As you get more adept at deciphering Web stats, you will start to identify patterns and behaviors. Use that knowledge to fine tune your site and better understand your customers.