Got Stats? - Web site statistics software

“You can only measure what you can count.“ ~Jan Limpach

"How To" use web site traffic stats software to increase the effectiveness of your web site. Do you have web site stats? How many “Hits” do you get? Let’s stop right here and get our terminology straight before we continue.

Some key definitions: The question is sometimes asked, what is the difference between Hits, Visits or Views?

Hits - How many physical resources were requested from the server by that visit. Pages are made up of many items (images, text, etc). Each of those is a hit, while a view is the page itself. Hits is NOT a Useful number, Disregard!

Visits - Someone comes to your web site and looks around a bit. They may go to one page, or they may go to 100 pages, but they're still only visiting once.

Page Views - How many pages were seen by that visit.

What is more useful? Visits and Pages Views, represent people coming to your site and the number of web pages they saw, which is very useful for analyzing usage patterns and understand what people are seeing.

Search Engines – Knowing where your organic traffic is coming from is very important.

Keyword Phrase – Successful keywords visitors searched on to find your site.

Entry Pages - The entry page is the first page a web site visitor goes to during a visit.

Exit Pages - The page a visitor leaving your site was on prior to moving to a different website.

404 Errors – Page not found error. Important way to find broken links on your site, and get them fixed.

Types of web statistics software

this brings us to what method to use when tracking your web stats, the web log analyzer vs. page tagging method.