| Jul. 03 2006 at 9:44 AM |
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Chuck,
You explained why not to look at hits. My stats give me visitors and unique
visitors. How is that different?
I also have 'page request'? I suppose that's more accurate, yes?
Thanks.
Dan
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| Jul. 03 2006 at 4:36 PM |
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My understanding of it is that "unique visitors" is limited to one "unique visit" per one IP address, whereas "visitors" is each time someone visits your website, regardless if its the same person. So if I visited your website 10 separate times today, there would be one unique visitor listed (since I am only one viewer), but 10 visits. So a good way to see if your traffic is by the same few people visiting over and over again, or many different people checking out your website, you can check the unique visits. Hopefully that wasn't too confusing... 
http://www.pixeltorch.com - Helping small businesses increase sales using the internet
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| Jul. 05 2006 at 9:41 AM |
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I recommend looking at unique visitors and pages per visitor. This is on the dashboard if you are using Google Analytics. Hits can include images and files that load and is a very inaccurate reporting metric. I also recommend diving into your search engine referral metrics. This allows you to see what keywords people are using to find your site and is especially useful if you are planning to use search engine marketing techniques in the future.Kelly Cutler
CEO
Marcel Media
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| Jul. 05 2006 at 10:53 AM |
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aixanyc wrote: Chuck,
You explained why not to look at hits. My stats give me visitors and unique
visitors. How is that different?
I also have 'page request'? I suppose that's more accurate, yes?
Thanks.
Dan
Hey Dan - normally the distinction between visitors and unique visitors is as follows:
visitors = total number of "sessions" your site received in a given time period; that is, what's the raw number of times any visitor came to your site and spent some time there, whether it was their first time or their fiftieth time.
unique visitors = total number of distinct individual visitors that came to your site during a given time period. So the unique number takes out multiple visits by a return visitor and just counts them once.
I suppose the simpler way to explain it is to look at a single person - for example, during the month of June, let's say that I come and visit your site 7 times. When you're looking at your number of visitors, I would be counted 7 times in that total - when you look at your number of unique visitors, I would be counted 1 time.
What the two numbers allow you to do is get a much better picture of the pattern of behavior on your site - when you start looking at total visitors to your site and break it down by repeat and new visitors, you start to get a much better sense of how good a job you're doing attracting and retaining visitors, how many times those repeat visitors are coming back, and you open the door to even greater insights into how people are interacting and reacting to your website content.
Page request is likely just another way of saying page view (pageview).
chuck fuller
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| Jul. 05 2006 at 12:17 PM |
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Over the past year I've found that a combination of analytical tools has been most useful for me. I use Statcounter.com (the $10/month package), Sitemeter.com (free) and the weblogs generated by my hosting service. (I haven't had time to check out Google!)
Testing out the various free services will give you an idea of how they all accumulate, group and display data. For instance, statcounter does not show outclicks (how users leave your site) but sitemeter does. Sitemeter, however, doesn't present data in a way that's useful for me, statcounter does. Statcounter has the ability to download data logs to an excel or .csv file free, sitemeter provides that as part of their paid packages. And on and on....
You'll also want to accumulate data over time in order to identify repeat visitors, trends, etc... How you do this is also up to you and what works best for you. You can download the logs and analyze the data yourself, or subscribe to one of the services, which will store data for you and present it in different formats.
Playing around with the different services (and there are far more than the 2 I mention here) will help you figure out what you need and also give you ideas for analyzing your data that you didn't have before. Plus, it's fun!
Karen
Patriot Tours, Inc.
www.patriottoursnyc.com
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| Jul. 05 2006 at 1:12 PM |
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That's a great point Karen, and it's highly recommended that you run a couple of services, just to make sure neither is missing any signficant trends or data points. What's particularly useful is employing a page tagging service, such as Google Analytics, and a log file tool, in order to compare the two results.
It's guaranteed that you'll see different numbers within whatever service you use, but the overall trends should mirror each other - if that's not happening, then there's likely a serious issue with one of the tools you're using.
chuck fuller
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| Jul. 06 2006 at 9:34 AM |
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Thanks, everyone, for the info. One more thing:
In Visitor Paths: what is robots.text?
Dan
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| Jul. 06 2006 at 9:46 AM |
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aixanyc wrote:
In Visitor Paths: what is robots.text?
Dan
In order to prevent web crawlers (like search engines) to crawl through your website and index your webpages a robots.txt file is kept on the webserver. Though no web crawler is not bound to obey this rule, but all the majot search engines etc. respect the robots.txt file.
You can find more information - here.
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