Website Analytics: Hits – Page Views – Unique Visits Explained
Website analytics explained: the difference between hits, page views, unique visitors, visitors and returning visitors. If you are wondering why I just repeated the title it is because the description within the meta tag is drawn from the first hundred or so characters of the article. I had tried some different plugins for WordPress that control the tags, but they were interfering with each other after the latest WordPress update. Forgive me for the redundancy, but as you well know the meta title and description are very important!
The Vocabulary of Website Analytics
By now you all know that tracking your website visitors is very important. We have talked about the different types of website analytic services and software there are, and how they work. Next up is an explanation of the core stats and what they mean. The individual statistics that are tracked are called metrics. An individual statistical result of traffic analysis is a metric. Simply put hits, page views and visitors are metrics.
One of the most important terms that often gets overlooked is referrers. This can help you determine if your visitors are actually people as opposed to bots or spiders. In fact one of my favorite tools from way back (in Internet terms way back is around 2000) is AWstats. A simple but effective Perl scripting engine with a nice and simple GUI, AWstats was the first tool I ever used to analyze traffic. I bring it up because they actually have a category called people which simplifies the referrer data.
Other than people there is only one other term that might be confusing to a newcomer: bandwidth. My hosting company allows me 200GB of burstable bandwidth for my servers (2) every month. Unless I have a couple of Grateful Dead concerts on my site for download, there is little chance I will ever get close to using it up. There is reason to take a look at bandwidth however. Like many site owners that wanted a blog I chose the best of them all: WordPress. WordPress utilizes a technology called XML-RPC to communicate directly with search engines and RSS directories. Along with normal submittals I also use advanced tools called planters to list by blog as well as my articles. One of the engines I submitted to called MixCat, was getting caught in one of my image directories and looping through a cgi script I use to add image thumbnails into specific RSS feeds. This was taking a hell of a lot of bandwidth, and the worst kind – outgoing. It threw me over my monthly allotment. Once I saw the bill I called Rackspace and they found the culprit. That is why it is important to keep an eye on bandwidth.
For the remainder of this article I will be using terms and examples from Google Analytics. They are for the most part universal and you will be able to gain a clear understanding of traffic reporting terms.
Website Analytic Term: Hits
One of the most overused and least important statistic in analytics is “hits“. A webmaster boasting that they are getting a million hits a day might only be getting 100 unique visitors or actual “people” visiting his site! A website that has tons of graphics, scripts or uses spacer images to line up their tables will get tons of hits. Every time a page is loaded every image, script, css call, html tag, include, etc. is a “hit”.
Since every website is different in the way it is coded and laid out, hits are not useful for any type of real measurement of traffic or as a comparison of your traffic to another sites traffic.
Website Analytics Term: Page Views
One of the most meaningful metrics are page views or pages. Back in the “Internet Dark Ages” (1998 when I built my first web site) what everyone had was page counters or hit counters. Amazingly enough I still see hit counters on peoples websites! Anyway when a page is pulled up and loaded that is considered a page view. Taken with other metrics like visitors, this valuable stat tells you how many pages on your site are being viewed by your average visitor. If your visitors to page views ration is 1 or less, then you are in trouble. My site has an average of 4 page views per new visitor. That means that the first time somebody comes to my site they are looking at an average of 4 pages.
How you set up Analytics is so important to the page view metric. You must make sure that things like images and cgi scripts are not included in the page tracking. I am going to be getting very detailed in Google Analytics set up ans will be covering these important filters. Unless you are showing possible advertising clients your traffic and page views, you don’t want to fudge on what your Analytics package considers a page. Page types is another important factor. Dynamic pages that are created by a database with analytics code in a footer include can often be mistaken for other pages. This happens quite a bit on off the shelf e-commerce programs like OS Commerce and Zen Cart.
The page view metric is best used when applied together with another metric such as unique or returning visitors when you have a dynamic website. If your site is static then certainly the page data will be more valuable. Since pages and page views are different for every type of website please leave your questions as comments to these articles so I can clarify things for everyone.
Website Analytics Term: Visitors
In my opinion the metric visitors along with its sub metrics unique, returning and just plain visitors is the most important general metric. Everything that you track or is worth tracking is wrapped around the visitor metric. Even content, pages and site navigation analysis depends on the visitor statistics. Where a visitor came from, what they typed in to get to your site, what they did on the site, etc. are the heart of everything from ROI on pay per click to the stickiness of your content.
Since there is just so much to look at in analytics I am going to keep things basic at this point. A visitor can be separated into 2 distinctly different types: people and machines. I have my analytics set up to track spiders such as GoogleBot and Slurp separately from human visitors. I have seen many companies that are employing advanced tracking systems such as WebTrends actually completely filter spiders! How often and how deep a site is crawled is extremely vital information. That being said, it is also important to keep them separated. I also recommend that you filter your own IP and the IP addresses of your company or client. Skewed data is no good to anyone and if you are like me you hit your own website hundreds of times a day.
Unique Visitors And Why That Is The Money Metric
Of all the visitors, the unique visitor is the most important metric. Some analytics programs don’t separate the types of “visitors”, if yours is one of those, than I highly recommend that you ditch it and get Google Analytics. There is a huge difference from visitors and unique visitors.
A unique visitor is counted as the first visit of a computer to your site. I say computer as opposed to a person, because it is tracking both the IP (physical address) of the actual machine as well as a cookie that is placed within that machine’s browser. The cookie is a key factor since many people’s computers don’t have a static or unchanging IP address. If you are on broadband or DSL, everyone in your neighborhood has the same IP.
While some sites live or die by the returning visitor statistic, most sites don’t care too much about the average visit statistic. I personally don’t believe that it can be tracked with enough accuracy to warrant the attention that a site that must know if visitors are returning needs. Let me give you an example. A website offers software for sale. They have demo versions of the software that are free, and then full versions that cost money. A site like that would need to know how many people that downloaded the demo actually purchased the software. This is a lot more tricky than you can possible imagine since who knows how long the customer is going to take to decide if they want to buy the software? Some browsers like IE 7 don’t retain long-term cookies. In fact I suspect that 48 hours is the longest you can expect to obtain return visitor data with any type of accuracy.
SO what does that have to do with “unique visitors?” Well the amount of uniques your site gets is a very good baseline as to your traffic. If you base all your funnels (specific tracking campaigns) on the unique visitor metric, it makes it easier to gauge trends as well as set up goals.
My next article will delve deeply into the core functions of Google Analytics.
Website Linking Strategies: An Overview of Pass Through Ratio
Linking is the single most important part of search engine optimization. You might have built the most spectacular website in the world, but if no can get to it, or if users can’t find it in the search engines, it serves no purpose. Search Engine Optimization really boils down to 3 basics:
- Keywords – identify the words that users will type into search engines to find your site.
- Optimize - place your keywords within the domain, the URL’s and throughout the site’s content.
- Link – list your site in directories and obtain links from other web sites. Have a good internal linking structure.
Internal Linking Strategies
The most important part of your website is your content, but how that content is accessible is just as crucial. If your users can’t readily find what they are looking for, then they will leave your site and never come back. Every site has some sort of navigation. Whether it is a fancy Flash menu system with rollover effects going across the header or simple text links running down the sidebar, you have to have navigation.
How your internal pages link together outside of the navigation or footer links is extremely important for SEO as well as usability. For now I am concerned with SEO, but if you are interested in linking for usability read: Website Usability Deep Link Navigation. The search engine spiders follow the links within your content as well as the links within your navigation and footer. In fact it is the content links that are of more importance, especially on the home page.
A website and its pages are broken down into tiers. The top tier pages are your home page and any pages that are linked directly from it. The second tier pages are linked from pages other than your home page. For instance if you have a link from your home page to your services page, and from services you link to the individual pages that explain your different offerings, those sub pages are second tier. Those pages that are not linked to the home page, but only to your service page are third tier pages. If you have sub-pages under the different individual services those would be fourth tier pages and so on.
The graphic below shows a 3 tier system and how Google Page Rank diminishes the further a page is linked from the home page. This demonstration is taking into consideration that the tier pages have the proper “Pass Through Ratio”.
Search engines, particularly Google prefer that pages are within the root directory. Many webmasters will make a separate sub folder called /services/ and put that categories pages within it to better organize the files on the web server. Unless your site is dynamic or you have thousands of pages you should keep your pages within the root. This is also important to the tier linking. Pages within the same directory have a much better chance of passing the Page Rank on to its sub pages.
Pass Through Ratio And Why Its So Important To Linking
The pass through ratio is broken down into 2 types:
- Domain Pass Through – the carry over of page rank to pages linked from overall website elements such as footers and navigation.
- Page Pass Through – the carry over of authority and page rank from one page (or tier) to another.
When you are first developing a website drawing out your site linking structure is one of the most overlooked facet of design. You must plan your internal linking carefully to not water down your top tier pages. Too many outbound links on a page (even internal links) will take away its authority and ability to score higher page rank.
More importantly, on an existing website, the addition of new pages and their ability to rank in search engines depends on pass through. Top tier pages that need to also support pages under them must have outside linking to them directly for them to be able to pass on their authority.
When obtaining inbound links whether you do reciprocal link exchange or buy links from a broker make sure to also get links for your internal pages. That is the most important aspect of pass through, the weight of the internal tier pages. My next article will go into detail about link gathering tactics.
Ugly Rumor Microsoft Buying Yahoo Again
The rumor mill is working overtime as Microsoft is again pursuing the acquisition of Yahoo. Reportedly $80 billion is what Yahoo thinks its value is, even though most market analysts see it more in the $50 billion range. I have seen a lot of experts saying that Microsoft won’t pull the trigger since it has invested so much into MSN over the years. The fact is this move does make a lot of sense for Microsoft.
Why Microsoft Should Buy Yahoo
If you follow my blog you know that Google is moving into the portal space that is dominated by Yahoo. While as far as portals go, MSN is second, the difference is in the millions between Yahoo users and MSN users. By users I mean people that use my.yahoo as their home page. In the bad old days of dial up, AOL was the clear champion, but times have changed and they don’t even offer Internet access anymore. Since the majority of AOL users are in the under 20 – over 50 demographic, no serious Internet user would claim to use AOL.
Now that just about everyone has high speed Internet of one type or another, everyone needs a starting place. Google knows that users that have a Yahoo home page are more inclined to do their shopping and searching there. Sure many computers come with Google search tools built into their browsers and desktop. Anyone that uses Firefox has the Google search as part of the toolbars. IE users are downloading the Google Toolbar and anyone that is involved with Internet Marketing follow Page Rank with the Google Toolbar.
Having all that power is not enough for Google. They want to be the be all – end all for users on the Internet. Their move to Universal Search, (see my article The Changing Face of Google if you don’t know what Universal Search), the upgrade from Froogle to Google Base, Personalized Search and Google Checkout are all examples of Google’s move to be your home page. Throw in Gmail and they are trying to gain all your Internet activity. They also actively gather data to make your Internet experience better.
All these things point to Google keeping their dominance in the search arena. By doing so they will further increase the value of AdWords and AdSense. That is after all how they make their money. How can Microsoft possible compete within the paid search space? The fact is they can’t. Yahoo bought Overture a while back and that put them in the driver seat as far as paid search goes. Google has the rest of the market share, there just isn’t any room for MSN or Windows Live.
Microsoft has known for years that they have dropped the ball on the Internet. They have done a poor job and they know it. While some say it is a desperate move to buy Yahoo, I think it is the only way they can have any presence to speak of on the Internet. As the Internet Presence Manger for some high profile sites I know how a company can live or die with organic search. Giving Google real competition is the best way to keep them on their toes and be more friendly to SEO. While Google preaches that they want to help Webmasters, that just isn’t so. The only way to keep Google in line is to create competition, and Yahoo can’t do it alone. Only with the vast empire of Microsoft behind them can Yahoo hope to eat into Google’s space. Only together can Microsoft and Yahoo stop Google from dominating the portal space.
Since Google started its personalized search and instituted custom home pages, I have been maintaining both Yahoo and Google home pages. The big difference is Google’s attention to blogs. The ability to easily add a blog’s feed to your Google home page is the big draw for me. If Yahoo is going to go it alone, then they must pay more attention to blogs to hope to maintain its market share of the portal space.