Understanding Your Website Traffic Statistics

If you are new to Internet business, you might find all of the website jargon and phrases quite confusing. You can start a business on the Internet and market until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t know what that marketing is doing for you, you might as well be doing nothing at all. Once you have the website statistics broken down for you, you can take all of the information and apply it to your marketing strategy so that you continue to draw in repeat customers as well as bring in some new ones, as well.

There are four big terms in website traffic statistics: hits, visits, unique visitors, and page views. These four terms may seem like they are interchangable when you hear them, but when it comes to your website traffic statistics they are all different, and if you want to succeed in Internet business it’s important that you learn what all these phrases mean and what they can do for you and your business.

The first term is hits. Most people that analyze website traffic statistics will tell you that this stat is fairly worthless. Hits refer to the number of times that a page, image, or file on your site is viewed or downloaded by someone. Because hits record every page view on your website it is not an accurate way to determine how many people are viewing your website and making use of the content or services offered there.

The next common term is visits. The term visit is defined most commonly as each new incoming visitor to the web page that was not on your website during the last 60 to 90 minutes. Visits do not require anyone to buy anything or click on anything, they simply have to come and view the page.

Unique visitors is the term that refers to the number of client hosts that come to visit the site and visit at least one page. The unique visitors statistic typically is able to provide the number of different people that have visited the site, not just how many times the pages have been viewed as the statistics are reached through looking at the number of IP addresses come to the site. This can be very valuable information because you can discern how many people your marketing efforts are reaching.

Page views is a statistic that will provide you with the number of times an actual page on the site is viewed. This statistic is typically provided as a sum for all the the visitors. This is much like the “hits” statistic, except that it only counts pages and does not count files, images, and other downloads.

As you can see, each of these terms refers to something entirely different. None of this information can be used alone, instead one should use it all together to determine what they may need to change, what is working, and how well their current marketing plan is working.

Source: Craig Rowe