Web Statistics

So you have your site all set up? Now you want to know who is visiting and what they are looking at. You want to be able to see that content is popular This is where statistic programs come in. Statistic programs keep track of the who,what, where and how aspects of your site.

• Who is visiting your site? (What country are the majority of my visitors from?)
• What are they looking at? (what content is popular?)
• Where did they come from? (Search engines, refereral links, direct traffic)
• How long did they stay at my site? (bounce rates)

Terminology

• Unique Visitors - The amount of unique visitors to your site. If you have one visitor who viewed 10 pages of your web site, your unique visitor count would only be 1.
• Total Visits - The total amount of visits regardless of uniqueness. If we used the same example as above, the number would be 10.
• Page Views - Every time a page is loaded, this number gets incremented by 1.
• Hits - Every server request is counted as a hit. If you have an image gallery page with 20 images, there would be 20+ hits just for one user accessing that one page.
• Referrals - If a visitor comes to your site from another site that linked to you, you can see it from the visitors referral URL. This is a great way to find sites that have linked to your content.

Popular Software For Tracking Traffic

• Google Analytics - Completely hosted by Google. You do not have to download and upgrade any software.
• AWStats - An open source web traffic analyser.
• Webalizer - Another popular open source statistics script.

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