Analytics, Traffic and Website Statistics
The first:
My hosting organization offers a simple integrated stats program called AW stats.
It has a graphical user interface and is very easy to understand.
Visits
Visitors
Pages
Hits
By Year
By Month
By Day
By Hour
Duration of your visitor’s visit to your site
Where they are from
How they got there
What browser they used, what kind of computer they use
What color of hair they have…
Just kidding about the hair.
Let me show you a couple examples and go through the AW stats system for a bit.
www.webbikinistore.com
www.netricks.com
www.continentalfeathers.com
Understanding how to read the stats is important
Reading Awstats
The following definitions of the terms used in the Awstats statistics package will help you to interpret your website statistics. They are listed as they appear from top to bottom in the Awstats package. Remember to view Awstats, login to your control panel, click web/ftp stats, then click Awstats. As you can see by the terms below, it is a very comprehensive statistics package.
Last : This tells you when your statistics were last d. Generally they are d every 24 hours. Occasionally it may be a little longer.
Report Period: This is the month for the statistics you will see on this page. You may choose any month from when your account was d.
Unique Visitors: The Unique visitors to your website are visitors with different IP addresses, in other words clicks to your website coming from different computers. If someone enters your website address in 5 times this is one unique visitor, and 5 visits.
Number of Visits: The number of visits to your website is the total amount of times people have visited your website. These may not be all from the same visitor, for example one person may have clicked on your website 10 times. To determine the total amount of people who have visited your website, look at your unique visitors figure.
Pages: This figure is the number of pages people have viewed on your website. Each time someone looks at a page on your website, this figure goes up by 1.
Hits: This term is very often used instead of "Unique Visitors" to describe the total amount of visitors to your website in a certain period. The real meaning of a "hit" is when something is downloaded from your website by a visitor. This may be text, a picture, a page, a flash file etc. You will generally not need to pay much attention to this figure.
Bandwidth: This figure shows you the amount of data downloaded by your visitors. If this is nearing your monthly quota for your account, contact me to enquire about getting a larger bandwidth setting.
Monthly History: This table shows you the summary table above this for each month of the current year. This allows you to compare each figure with previous months.
Days of the Month: This figure shows you the number of visits, pages, hits and bandwidth for the current month in a tabular and graphical form.
Days of the week: These figures allow you to determine the most popular day of the week that people visit your website, in terms of pages, hits and bandwidth.
Hours: The time of day people visit your website, again in terms of pages, hits and bandwidth.
Countries: This is where each visitor to your website is located. Again figures for pages, hits and bandwidth are listed.
Hosts: These are the IP addresses of each computer that visits your website. This can be handy if you want to accurately track your visitors.
Authenticated and/or anonymous users: If your have a section to your website where clients can login, then they will be listed under this section. Otherwise if Awstats cannot determine the IP address of a visitor, they may be listed in this section also.
Robots/Spiders Visitors: Robots and spiders are used by search engines such as Google or Yahoo to index your website.
Visits Duration: This tells you how long your visitors are staying on your website. At the top of the table you can see the average time for each user.
Files Type: In this table you can see what type of files people are downloading from your website.
Pages: This section tells you which pages are being visited the most. It also tells you which page the user entered or exited your site.
Operating Systems: Here you can see what operating systems your visitors are using. Eg windows, macintosh.
Browsers: The web browsers your visitors use to connect to your site.
Connect to site from: This table shows where your visitors connected to your website from. Whether they directly entered your address into their web browser, or whether they found it in a search engine or another website, this information will be listed here.
Search Keyphrases: This is a list of phrases people use to search for your website in search engines.
Search Keywords: This is a list of single words people use to search for your website in search engines.
Miscellaneous: Generally a section you should not pay much attention to. The only figure that usually displays is the 'Add to Favorites' figure which is an approximate value of the amount of visitors that have bookmarked your website in their browser.
HTTP error codes: This is a list of error codes for your website. The most common one is a 404 error, which visitors will get if they enter in your website or a page on your website with a spelling error or a page that simply does not exist.
