How to interpret your Website Statistics
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Understanding your website’s statistics provides you with a better understanding of your customers and visitors. This article will describe some terms relating to statistics and help you to better use your site’s statistics to improve your online success.

The file that contains a record of all the visits to your site is called the raw log access. When someone visits your site, the request for your website is sent to the server through their web browser. The sever responds by sending the web page back to their web browser so that the website can be viewed. Web pages are broken up into several pieces of information. If for example, you have three images on your website, the browser will send four requests to the server. One request is for the web page and the other three are for each image on your website.

Each request sent to the server is logged in the raw log access file. Requests are commonly referred to as “hits.” If you have had 1000 hits on your site, that does not mean 1000 people have visited your site. It means there have been 1000 request for web pages and all parts of the web page. For this reason, hits are not a good way to measure how active your website is. Imagine if a page on your website has 50 pictures. If one person wanted to access this page, it would be logged as 51 hits. There is a big difference between 51 hits, and the one person who visited your website.

Another common term to familiarize yourself with is page views. Page view is a measure of how many requests for a web page there were in a certain amount of time.

This is the number of requests for a web page itself. It does not look at how many hits there were. This is a better indicator of your website but not completely accurate of how many visits there are to your website. Someone may view a page, leave the page and then later return to the same page. Another person may hit the refresh button on the page. Every time the page is refreshed another request is logged. You cannot determine how many people visited your website, using page views.

Your web traffic log will have some key components. The introductory section should show you how many actual visitors you have had to your site. You will be able to see the average amount of times visitors spend at your website. This will help you to know how well your website can hold people's interests.

Statistics about your most and least requested pages can tell you a lot about what's hot and what's not on your website. If you sell products on your website, it could lead you to those that are most popular. Single access pages are pages that a visitors views and then leaves without looking through a website any further. This may be your homepage. Keep in mind that some people will come to your page by mistake or just simply will not have what they are looking for and they will leave right away. If you large volume of single access pages, you may have a problem. Take your homepage for example, this page should show visitors why they have come to the right place; that you have what they are looking for.

Top referring sites are those sites that send visitors to your website. The largest number may be “No Referrer.” This is when people type your URL directly into their browser or have it book marked. A high number of “No Referrer’s” shows you your marketing methods are effective.

There are other statistics to evaluate, however, these are some of the basics and the most important. Viewing your site statistics can help show you where you need improvement and what things are working well for you.

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