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.

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Website Analytics: Understanding Basic Web Site Statistics

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article on Website Analytics An Overview Of Traffic Statistics which was a pretty basic post about traffic stats. I have gotten a ton of emails from people who want to know more about analytics, how they work and why they are so important.

I want to take a second to let everyone know that while I appreciate emails and questions, it would do everyone a favor if questions were posted as comments on the blog post. This helps keep everything organized and helps me keep my posts fresh in the SERPS. Even though WordPress asks for an email address to comment, I don’t ever SPAM or contact my readers ever. Feel free to leave your questions as comments so everyone can benefit.

Basic Web Analytics - Simple Traffic Statistics

Just about everyone and their mother has a website these days, but most of my readers have a site that one way or another makes money. Whether you sell software or products right from your site or you provide a service and your site generates leads, your site is an important part of your business. In fact the majority of my clients rely solely on their site for income.

If you have a site, you have stats. No matter what platform your site is hosted on, your server tracks your site visitors, where they came from, what type of browser they use, etc. All of these stats can tell you important information. For example by looking at the average screen resolution of your site visitors you can tell if your site is configured properly so users don’t have to do any unnecessary scrolling. Knowing the keywords users typed in to find you can help you build up keyword strategy and build more pages with content that visitors are interested in.

Using A Web Based Analytics Web Traffic Program

While it is true that you could invest a ton of money and get a program like WebTrends which is a very expensive, but powerful suite of tools for analytics, most web site owners can get everything they need out of a tool like Google Analytics. One of the problems with Google Analytics is that there is a limit to how much traffic it will process. While that number is pretty high at 5 million page views per month, if you have an “active” AdSense account there is no limit. What Google considers as active is any one’s guess.

I could devote a whole post to what the difference is between page views, hits, unique visitors and visitors. 5 million page vies a month is a lot of traffic. If your site is getting that much traffic then you can easily fork over the money for an advanced web analytics package.

Google is free, but if you need more features specifically conversion tracking and custom funnels there are paid services like Web Side Story that are also web based. A Web Based tracking system means that you have to install code usually at the very bottom of every page, usually before the </body> tag. The stats are kept on the tracking system’s server.

While Web Side Story is very powerful it is also difficult to configure unless you are a geek like me or you can hire a consultant. Don’t bother trying to get support out of them, they are pretty weak in that area. In fact one of my clients just dumped them due to support issues. I was getting a lot of great data from them, but it would take weeks to get help in setting up the conversion data we needed to track software sales from search engine > keyword typed > entry page > navigation > demo download > eventual purchase.

That last sentence is an example of a conversion funnel. With software it can be days between the demo download to the purchase. This is the primary weakness of Google Analytics, and even to an extent WSS and OneStat. WebTrends and NetTracker rely upon log files which means they can’t give you real time statistics, but because they are server based, they have scripting and cookie services that allow you to plant a tracker on your visitors so you can see a sale days after a download of a demo.

Traffic Statistics Gathering on Windows IIS Server

While it is true that IIS (that is Windows’ webserver) collects stats automatically, you do have to go into your site’s definition file and make sure that all the available stats are being gathered. By default only the most basic visitor stats are collected. A program like Webalizer can take your traffic logs and view the stats in an easy to read format locally on your computer or online through a web interface.

Traffic Statistics Gathering on Apache Linux Web Server

Like many of you I prefer open source web servers. I am an Apache and Red Hat guy and have been for a long time. Systems like WordPress run better in the environment they were meant for. I have ported many an open source system over to the Windows PHP Triad system, and it leaves a lot to be desired.

Apache saves visitor tracking very much like IIS and you also have the option of choosing what stats you want to track. Most of the servers I have set up keep the stats and traffic logs in the default path /etc/httpd/logs/access_log, but I always make a custom location based upon the domain name. Again Webalizer is an easy system to use, but you should see what your hosting provider uses and supports.

Since I have my own servers I have a lot more options than most of my readers. If you are hosting just 1 website you will have to see what your host uses. I don’t know of any hosting company that doesn’t account for web traffic analysis. Even GoDaddy hosting has an OK system.

I will be getting into great detail about web analytics over the next week.

Website Analytics: An Overview Of Traffic Statistics

It has been a while since I last posted. Since most of my readers are SEO or other types of Internet presence managers, I am sure that they and you will understand what it is to be so busy you can barely breathe. With the changes that both Google and Yahoo are implementing it has taken a couple of weeks to install a solid plan for my clients. The key is not to be in reactionary mode all the time, to try and grasp the big picture of what the search engines’ true goals are.

In this case Google’s continued steamrolling into the portal space along with its continued commitment to personalized search, has led me to make severe changes to much of the way I have been displaying content. I am happy to report that the initial results are fantastic!

Traffic Reports and The Art of Analytics

If you are reading this, you probably have a web site or manage one. You also are tracking that websites traffic. If you are not, then I suggest you immediately set up Google Analytics for tracking. Rather than explain how to set up the analytics here, visit my post on Website Usability and Analytics on Active Rain. In the comments of the blog there is a detailed tutorial on how to setup, configure and install Google Analytics.

Analytics is a detailed look at your site visitors, how they got there, and most important: what they are doing on your site! These statistics are usually broken down into different categories:

1. Visitors - these reports focus on your site users. It tracks all visits to the site, and if you don’t have filters installed or configured to eliminate your own company’s IP’s and search engine user agents, it is likely that your stats are skewed. The most important stat is the “unique” visitor. That tells you how many people actually came to your site. It will also tell you if they came back. Visitor loyalty is extremely important. If you have a blog and your loyalty index is below 10% then you might want to consider a writing tutorial. Some analytics programs will also give you visitor tracking within the visitor package. This gives you an idea of where they went on the site, how they entered the site, and where they exited the site. Another important stat is how long they were on any given page, and how long they were on the site.
2. Marketing - these stats make up the second most relevant pieces of info: what keywords the user typed in to reach your site. It will also separate organic from paid clicks. My next couple of posts will be concerned with e-commerce and paid versus organic traffic.
3. Technical - this grouping tells you important facts about your visitors like screen resolution which is important if you have a fixed width website. Knowing the average screen resolution of your visitors tells you if your site might be too wide. Platforms and browser types are also good things to know so you can insure your site is browser compliant. These days cross platform usability isn’t as important as it used to be, since most people are using IE or FireFox anyway and they are both easily updated. Another important stat in this grouping has to do with broken links, 404 error pages and dropped forms. Knowing where your site has problems can help in resolving basic usability issues.

One of the coolest features of Google Analytics is its site overlay. This gives you a clean look at what links on your site users are clicking on to get into your site.

Next up are looks at different types of visitors and how they behave.