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What's the Score? Basic Web Analytic Terminology
by Scottie Claiborne ©Copyright 2004

Web stats. Site statistics. Don't run away... you need to read
this! The very thought of deciphering site statistic programs
sends many site owners running to do all kinds of tasks that are
less painful and tedious, like going to the dentist or cleaning
the tile grout with a toothbrush.

If you know what you are looking for, site stats are not that
painful and can be a real motivator to improve performance. They
are the scoreboard that allows you to benchmark your performance
and challenge you to find ways to make your site convert at a
higher rate; more sales, more signups, more participation.

Let's review some of the basic terminology you will find in most
web analytics program and demystify it so that you know what to
measure, what to ignore, and what it all means.

Hits

Hits are the most overused and misunderstood measurement in web
analytics. In the early days, people would brag about how many
hits their website got... today most people know that hits are
not a reliable measurement.

A hit is any element called by your browser when it requests a
page. A single page may register a single hit or hundreds of 
hits based on how it has been built. Images, external style 
sheets, external java scripts, and other elements that require 
the server to pull a file to build the page register as hits. 
Since every page has a different number of elements, hits are 
not a reliable measurement.

Files

A file is a hit that actually returned data from the server. Not
all hits return data. Cached elements and errors are examples of
hits that are not counted as files. This measurement is not
likely to be helpful to you either.

Pages or Page Views

A Page or Page View is a measurement of the pages requested from
the server. This is a good measurement to keep up with. You can
get a rough idea of the number of pages the average visitor 
views by dividing this number by the number of visitors.

Page views can give you an idea of whether or not visitors are
finding what they need on your site and progressing through it 
or viewing a single page and leaving.

Sites, Unique Visitors, and Repeat Visitors

Sites and unique visitors increment your visitors by recording
their IP address. This gives you an idea of the number of
visitors to your site in a given time period. It's not entirely
accurate as people visiting your site from the same IP address
(such as people on an office network or on dial-up where IP's
rotate) will be counted as a single site or visitor.

Repeat visitors simply takes that IP address and compares it to
see if the same IP address has visited more than once. Again, a
margin of error for multiple users on the same IP address will
skew this number.

Session and Visit Duration

This metric tries to measure the amount of time a user browsed
your site. While it seems like a good idea to measure this, it's
not a very accurate measurement. People may not be actively
browsing your site, but they may have it open. A visit may "time
out" at different intervals, and a new session is started for 
the same visitor.

One thing to note would be a large number of very short visits;
it may indicate your search terms are not very well targeted and
people are not finding what they expect on your site.

Referrers or Referring Sites

The link a visitor clicked on to arrive at your site is counted
as a referrer or referring site. A large number of your referrers
will be internal pages, the rest will be other sites or search
engines. You may also see some web-based e-mail programs in your
referrer logs. Bookmarked pages and urls typed directly into the
browser will not show a referrer.

Referring sites is definitely something you want to watch- you
can tell who is linking to you and how much traffic they send,
including the search engines. When checking referring sites,
don't click the URL in your web analytics program... copy and
paste it into a new browser window. Otherwise your stats page
will then appear in their referring sites!

Search Terms and Search Strings

Search terms and search strings are pulled from the referring 
url from traffic sent by search engines. Search strings are more
useful than search terms...just because single words are listed
in the search terms does not mean a visitor found your site by
typing in that one word. It's simply every word in the search
strings listed separately.

Search strings can tell you a lot about your search engine
traffic- Are there phrases there you didn't expect? What 
phrases that you did expect are missing?

Browsers, User Agents, and Operating Systems

Browsers or user agents and operating systems will tell you what
type of browser and operating system your visitors are using,
often detailing it to the version number. You may want to
double-check to see how your pages render in the browsers your
visitors are using. Don't get lulled into a false sense of
security by a small percentage of users for a specific browser...
translate that percentage into actual numbers. You may want to
check again for browser compatibility!

This information will typically show you the search engine 
robots traffic as well; you can see how often they are visiting 
your site and how many pages they are viewing.

Entry and Exit Pages

This is an interesting metric- it details the top entry pages
(the first page a visitor arrives at) and the top exit pages 
(the last page they view before leaving or timing out). This can 
help you identify the high interest pages and the pages where 
you are losing visitors.

If you can combine this metric with top pages viewed, you can 
get an idea of how people are progressing through your site.

The Basics

There are many, many things a web analytics package can tell you
these days that are truly amazing. Once you grasp the basics of
these measurements that are included in any web analytics
software, you will understand better what you want to measure 
and why. Then it's time to trade up to a full-featured package 
that can give you that finely detailed information in the way 
you want to see it.

Most hosts these days have free web analytics programs 
installed- check your control panel for your sites and see. 
It's probably labeled as "web stats" or "statistics". The most 
popular ones are Webalizer, Analog, and AWStats. If you don't 
have a web analytics program installed but you do have access to 
your raw logfiles, try Funnel Web, a free log analyzer
(http://www.funnelwebcentral.com/).

If you don't have built-in stats or access to your logfiles, get
a new host! You really do need to review this information 
monthly or quarterly to see how your site is doing with traffic 
and visitors. Put it on your calendar now- start benchmarking! 
You need to know the score.

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Scottie Claiborne is the owner of Right Click Web Consulting
(http://www.rightclickwebs.com) and the facilitator of the
Successful Sites Newsletter (http://www.successful-sites.com).
She is a speaker at the Search Engine Strategies conferences and
the High Rankings Seminars as well as the Administrator of the
High Rankings Forum (http://www.highrankings.com/forum) and a
moderator at the Cre8asite Forums (http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/).
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