It's a Hit! Gauging Success through Traffic Analysis

One of the most important aspects of Website management is traffic analysis. If you don't know where your visitors are coming from -- and in what numbers -- you can't effectively promote your site, or gauge the effects of any current promotion efforts.

Checking the stats for your site(s) should be a daily activity, and if you're not doing it already, now's the time to start!

Traffic Jargon

There is some confusion as to the different terms used to describe Website traffic. Misuse of these terms often causes miscommunication, so it's important that you know the correct words and concepts.. The most common terms you'll find include:

Hit

An HTTP request made to your server. "Hit" is often used to describe an impression, and that's incorrect. A request is made to your server for not only every HTML file, but also for every image, every movie, and every included javascript or css file. If you use frames, then one actual page view can result in multiple hits, as multiple files comprise that one page. Upon each request your server records another entry in its log files, so when log analysis programs read these files, they'll report total hits. People often think this is total page views and they get excited unnecessarily -- don't fall into the same trap.

Impression

A page view. An impression occurs when someone views one of your HTML pages. If you use frames, you should only count impressions on your main content pages, not those on the pages you use for your menu or header frames. Another way to look at this is to only count impressions on pages that display advertising.

Unique

A page view by a unique person within a 24 hour period. Uniques are usually measured by identifying the IP addresses of each visitor using your site. However some services, notably AOL, send all their members through proxy servers, so thousands or millions of people can share the same IP address. This usually means that if you record the number of uniques by reviewing impressions by unique IP addresses, your actual number will be slightly higher than what is reported in the logs. A better way to measure uniques would be a composite unique value composed of IP address, browser or user agent, and operating system.

Referrer

A page that links to your site. This doesn't have to be an actual page: it could, for instance, be the result set of a search engine. Looking at your referrers will tell you who's linked to your site.

User Agent

This refers to the software used to access your site. Sometimes known as a "browser" or "client", the term user agent can describe a PHP script, a browser like Internet Explorer, or a search engine spider like GoogleBot. If you can identify what software is being used to access your site, you'll be able to tell if users are abusing it, and when the search engines last crawled your pages.

Counters and Trackers

Early in the life of the Web, counters were fairly popular. A counter is a simple script that records the number of visitors to a site in a text file or database and then displays the total, either textually or graphically, on the Website. You still find them on some amateur pages, but for the most part, their use has died out -- primarily because site owners wanted more complex information about their traffic, but also because these counters have come to be seen as unprofessional.

Now most professional or commercial sites use tracking software. Tracking software tells you more than just the number of visitors -- it can break visitor statistics down by date, time, browser, page viewed, referrer, and countless other values. Trackers are so named because they can more or less detail for you the path a visitor takes through your Website, so they do more than just count your traffic: they track it. You can choose from three main types of tracking software -- let's look at your options.