Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Getting the Most from your Web Stats - Traffic

(Page 2 of 6 )

1. Traffic

• Hits – A hit is the result of a file being requested and served from your web site.

This is the most-often mentioned statistic. It can sound impressive if someone says that they get 1,000 hits in one day for example, but this can be a bit misleading. A hit is the access of a single file; therefore, if you have an HTML page that has 5 graphics on it, the HTML file itself, an external JavaScript file and an external CSS file, then that's going to count as 8 hits. If your site has pages that are dynamically generated on the server using lots of includes for example, that's going to count as even more hits for every file that makes up that page. To confuse things even further, some counter programs claim to count "page views," or accesses to a single page. They can claim this because their counting method depends on access of one file per page, as described above.

However, hit counts are important for one reason: tracking your advertising. Currently, all web advertising rates for banner ads and such are based on CPM, or counts per 1,000 hits or page views.

• Page Views – Page views are the amount of pages that are viewed on average.

Some web stats can track page views per visitor, some only track pages viewed per day overall. Regardless, the higher the page views, the better chance you will have to attract your customers to buy, or your visitors to sign up.

• Unique Visitors – Unique visitors are individual new visitors to your website.

Instead of hits or page views, this is probably one of the most important stats to monitor. This statistic will tell you how much new traffic you are receiving to your site daily, weekly, monthly or even hourly.

• Repeat visitors – The measure of visitors that have already been to your site at least once before.

In other words, these are all visits minus the unique visitors in the selected period. The percentage of repeat visits to all visits will give you a good picture of how appealing the content of your Web site is. Taking this one step further, is your site unique enough that search engine spiders are coming back for more?

Next: Referrers >>
 

More Website Marketing Articles
More By Jennifer Sullivan Cassidy

Comments On: Using Your Web Stats for SEO: Getting the Most from your Web Stats

· How often do you view and analyze your web statistics? What methods of analyzation...    · You need to analyze your website almost every day. www.WebAnalyser.NET is the...    · I'm a huge fan of Omniture SiteCatalyst, but it's so expensive and comprehensive...    · I swear I am now addicted to my stats. I check them like every half an hour and try...    · Thanks for your compliment. I certainly understand about being addicted to web...    · Omniture, WebTrends, NetTracker, Urchin all offer commercial products that blow just...   >>> Post your comment now!