Wondering if you are getting any traffic to your web site? Most web hosting accounts have statistical data that you can look at if you know where to find it. If your web host does not provide statistics you can rent online applications to keep track of your web site traffic. Knowing what to look for in your web site’s statistical data can help you make more educated marketing decisions.

Hits

Once you find your web site’s traffic statistics you need to understand what a hit actually is. Web site “hits” is a loose term but, if you want to know how many people have actually visited your web site you need to understand the difference between a hit and a visit.

A hit on a web site is any request from the web hosting server to display a graphic or page. A web site page may contain 4 graphics so in order to display that page it may produce 5 hits, one for the page and four for the graphics.

So you can see that looking at web site hits does not give you an accurate count of how many people have come to your site.

A more accurate count is that of unique visits. Some statistics softwares can show visits and unique visits. If a person comes to a site 3 times in one day it would be counted as 3 visits regardless of how many hits were involved. The software knows this is a visit by one person because all requests to a server come from unique IP addresses. A unique visit is counted only once per day regardless of how many times the person visited the site that day. Unique visits will represent the smallest number but will be more accurate for counting real people.

I should also mention that there are many robot programs that sweep through the internet touching web sites and will be counted as a visitor even though it is not a real person visiting your site.

What to Look For

There are many juicy tid bits of information that you can get from your web site’s statistics. Besides just looking at unique visits you can find out what type of visitors you are getting. You can see the amount of traffic you are getting form different countries. You can see percentages of the different operating systems are being used. You can even see what keyword phrases are being used to find you. This is very useful information.

The most important piece of information is referring urls or referring domains. This will show you how hits come to your site from other sites. As you know for link popularity you want to try to get as many links to your site as possible. Referring data shows proof positive that the links are working. You may be surprised to find that sites are linking to you that you are not familiar with.

Statistics Software

Many clients of Site Mechanix are introduced to the tech partner Webcentrica for their hosting and domain needs. At Webcentrica they can purchase for Traffic Facts for just $18 per year. It is a very easy to understand statistics software and can even be set up to email you a custom report directly to you at any frequency, day, week , month, what ever.

Statistics Software many times has to be installed on the server of your web host because it reads server logs.

Another popular statistics software that is found on web hosts that use cPanel for back end web site administration is called AwStats. It is very graphical and easy to understand. I personally prefer it over Urchin Stats which is also a popular free program

If your web host does not provide you with statistics software you can get free or inexpensive counters from third-party online applications. Beware many free counters or statistics software may not provide the information you are looking for or may involve advertising links that you may not want to have appear on your web site.

Here is a third-party that I recommend that is inexpensive and easy to use at BraveNet (http://www.bravenet.com/webtools/counter/). You can customize the look of the counter or make it invisible. It can be put on any page and you can use the icon itself as a password protected button to easily access your statistics.

In Conclusion

Web site statistics is really geeky stuff, but for the serious marketer it is valuable information if you know what to look for. Site Mechanix will be glad to help you locate your web site statistics for free and find out what you have available. If you don’t have statistics software we can help you acquire it for your web site.

Karl Knelson - Site Mechanix, LLC
Web Development and Web Consulting