Web Traffic Stats?

.co.uk · Nov 1, 2005

Total Hits
Total Files
Total Pages
Total Visits
Total KBytes

Total Unique Sites
Total Unique URLs
Total Unique Referrers
Total Unique Usernames
Total Unique User Agents

Which are the real key indicators regarding traffic?
And what do the others mean?
Anyone?

fred · Nov 1, 2005

Pages - number of WebPages viewed

Visits - number of different 'sessions'

KBytes - the amount of data (bandwidth)

Referrers - the referring website

User Agents - the browser software used

Hits - 1 page with 3 images = 4 hits (404-page not found is also a hit)

Files - Number of files served, a 404 does not count, only requests that result in a data being served.

Unique Sites - Unique IP addresses to access your site.

Unique URLs - Unique URLs accesses, so
http://www.yourdomain.com/page.asp?string=cheese and
http://www.yourdomain.com/page.asp?string=feet would be 2.

Usernames - if you have users set up (i.e. log-ins to access the site/part of the site)

I tend to find that Total Pages and Total Visits are the most useful

.co.uk · Nov 1, 2005

Thanks fred!
Now I can make more sense of all those titles.:razz:

Edwin · Nov 1, 2005

Least useful (and most quoted) is "hits".

People like to quote it because it's a huge number - for example, a page with 7 graphics on it would register 8 hits when it loads (1 for the page, 1 for each of the graphics). If somebody visits 20 pages in one visit, and each page has 9 graphics, that's 200 hits attributable to 1 visitor. However, unless you know exactly which pages each visitor visited, and how many elements each one was made up of, "hits" are a meaningless number.

Many people don't even understand what a "hit" is, they just see that their site got half a million of the things last month and think wow-oh-wow whereas if it's a heavily graphical site that might only correspond to a few thousand pageviews and perhaps a thousand or so visitors!