BF Internet - Established 1996

Understanding Your Website Statistics

February 10th, 2009, by Chris Ward

This will provide you with a quick overview of some of the more useful information the stats provide. It is by no means an exhaustive list but should be able to answer most of your questions about your site’s performance.

The first thing to look at is the Summary:

This shows the information for the month being currently viewed. The line to be looking at here is the “Viewed
Traffic”, this represents the people who have actually been viewing your web site. The items shown are the
following meanings:

Unique Visitor:

A unique visitor is a computer that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your web site during the current period shown by the report. If this computer makes several visits during this period, it is counted only once. So if the same person viewed your site every day for a month it would only count as one on this figure.

Visits:

Total number of visits made by all visitors. Think “session” here, say a person visits a page, and then requests three others without any more than an hour passing between any of the requests, all of the “pages” are included in the visit, therefore you should expect multiple pages per visit and if the same person comes back more than an hour later (say that evening) then you will get multiple visits from the same visitor.

Pages:

The number of “pages” logged. This doesn’t include all the files that are looked at as part of that page (such as the images)

Hits:

Any files requested from the server – this will include any images etc that are loaded as part of the pages.

Bandwidth:

Total number of bytes for pages, images and files downloaded by people browsing your site. Below this is the monthly history showing the traffic trends over the months of the current year to date:

Below this is a breakdown of the individual days of the current month, underneath the graph the information is further broken down into information about the day of the week and the hours of the day. Its rare that you will need to go into this much detail however.

The next item you are likely to be interested in is the section headed “Origin” on the left hand side links. The first part of this section will show where people who have visited your site have come from:

Those listed as “direct address” have either typed your website in directly or come to you from a bookmark.

Below this there is information about the search terms people used to find your site:

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