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Understanding site statistics
How do you know how many people have visited your site? How do
you know which pages they view? And what is meant by unique
visitors, hits, page views and raw log access. This article
seeks to explain these terms to you and provide an understanding
of these terms so you will have a better grasp of what is happening
on your site. We will first start with defining the terms used
in judging site statistics and then move on to analyzing how
they are used. The first term defined is raw log access because
it serves as the foundation for defining the rest of these
terms and is the foundation for all site statistics.
Raw log access is a term used to describe a file
which contains a record of all of the visits by people to your
site. When a
person visits your site what they do is request the web page
from your site. This request is sent by the web browser to the
server and then in response the server sends the web page back
to the browser so it can be displayed on the computer. But in
reality when a browser sends this request it is not just “send
the web page”. A web page is actually broken up into many
different pieces of information. For example, if you have four
pictures on your web page the browser will send five different
requests to the server; one for the web page and then one request
for each picture.
The reason why this is important is that each
of these requests are logged separately in the raw log access
file. You also might
know these requests as they are commonly called “hits”.
When someone says they have one million hits on their web site
it means they have had one million requests for web pages AND
those pieces of the web pages. Now the term hits used to be a
fairly common term for the measure of how popular a site was.
This is not a good measurement for how busy a site is. The reason
is that if you have one web page with 100 pictures one visitor
who wants to see this web page it will log 101 hits in the access
file (one for the web page and one for each picture on the web
page). If this web page had five visitors it would log 505 hits.
It sounds like a lot but there were only five people viewing
the page. Now compare this to a page which has just one picture
and text on it. Each person viewing it would log only two hits
(one for the page and one for the picture). If this second page
had 100 people visiting the page the hit count would only be
200. It looks like on the face of it the first page has more
traffic but in reality it doesn’t. This is why the amount
of hits a site receives doesn’t mean a lot because the
number of hits it receives is totally dependant on how the site
is developed. So what is a better method to compare two sites?
The next most commonly used term is “page views”.
Page views is a term which seeks to compare apples with apples
so you can evaluate web site pages with each other independent
of how the web page is constructed. This term basically says
that there were x number of requests for a web page in a certain
amount of time. It does this by going through the raw log access
file and looking for just the requests for the web pages themselves
and by ignoring all the rest. That is, ignoring how many hits
there were—just tell me how many requests there were for
the web page. This is a good indicator of how many times a particular
web page is viewed or how many particular pages were viewed on
a site. Looking at it on the face this is a good indicator, but
it also has its problems. For example, let us look at our example
with the two web pages. In the first example the number of hits
the first site had was 505; the second, 200. If you look at the
page views for these two sites the count would be as follows:
for the first site, 5; for the second, 100. A much better indicator
but the problem which naturally occurs is what happens when you
have one person who views one page leaves then comes back and
views the same page again? Or what happens when one person refreshes
the web page in the browser. Each time this happens another web
page request is logged. So you could have ten repeat people viewing
a site a couple times a month. Or you could have one person who
looks at your site once a day. How can you tell who has the most
people visiting? You can’t from page views. With page views
you get duplication which is unaccounted for when viewing the
results. So as a measure of overall traffic it is good, but for
a detailed analysis of how people are coming to your site it
is ineffective.
Continued on Page Two :: Site Statistics >>
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