Site Statistics are your Site's Compass

What are Site Statistic?

Site Statistics are reports showing site performance. They vary wildly in quality. Some show just basic traffic; others show more detailed information. We have selected the best statistical package from around the Web. Being Web Marketing professionals ourselves, simple reports are not enough. We understand the need for accurate reports that recorded all the data, not just traffic. We need to know specific information: where users are coming from, what search engines they use, and what search terms they were putting into the search engines. We have taken great care to provide accurate, meaningful, daily reports for your site.

Server logs keeps a record of everything the server does. We have our servers logging extra information. We have our statistics package set up to accept this additional information and create detailed reports that are the best in the business. Our reports run daily. If you want to closely monitor your site's results, we have the reports to do it.

How to Read a Statistics Report

Below is a chart of site traffic. Each row shows the traffic for one day. The table represents traffic for the month. There are four columns - Number of Visits, Pages, Hits, and Bandwidth. Each traffic indicator has a specific meaning. You must understand a report before accurately measuring your site's performance.

Number of Visits

Number of Visits is a measure how many visitors you had on that day. The Internet is a "stateless" protocol, meaning the web server doesn't know if your users are connected or not. To get around this "stateless" limitation, sophisticated Servers record sessions. A session begins when you first arrive and continues until you leave. A session is a visit to the site. If you were at a trade show number of visits would be how many people stopped by your booth that day.

Pages Viewed

A page view is serving up one web page. Page views are the number pages viewed on that day. For example, on November 2 there were 55 visitors who viewed 169 pages. This means that on average each person looked at about 3 pages. A high page count means people are reading your material. This is an indication of a well written site.

Hits

Hits are a meaningless statistic. A hit is anything a server does at all. For example, when a server serves a web page each image on the page is a hit. If the page has dozens of buttons, photos, and graphics it could equate to 100 hits per page. People refer to how many hits their site receives as if it were visits or pages. It isn't. Hits wildly overstate traffic and should be ignored.

Bandwidth

Bandwidth is the amount of data downloaded from the site. If the bandwidth is 925.5 KB this means about one megabyte of data was downloaded that day in images, html, and video. A CD holds 660 megabytes. If your bandwidth gets too high you can expect a call from your ISP. They pay for bandwidth by the month.