Many bloggers use at least one statistical analysis packages for their sites to gauge how successful/popular the site is. Bloggers with free blogs (such as Blogger) will usually use something like SiteMeter, while bloggers that host their sites may choose to use an Access Log reporting product.
Some are like me and use a combination of both.
But I thought I’d take a step back today and give a little background on what the different benchmarks actually mean. So if you’re just getting started with your blog, or if you’ve thought about implementing some tracking, this may be useful to you.
Total Hits- The number of requests for any file. This includes images, pages, pdf files, etc. Any object on a site that appears in a browser (or is downloaded) is recorded as a hit. Total Hits, as a statistic, is fairly useless. It tells you nothing about how your site is being used.
Page Views- A page view is recorded each time a visitor visits a web page on your site regardless of how many hits are generated. A page may have 10 images or other files included within the page, but only one page view is recorded. This is a much more useful statistic than hits.
Visits- A visit is recorded when something goes to your site. It could be a robot like Googlebot, which is indexing your content, or it can be a person. One person can have many visits to your site.
Visitors- A visitor is a person that comes to your site, who has accepted a cookie. This allows the visitor to be identified when they come back to your site.
Unique Visitors- This is the total number of visitors who have come to your site. Each visitor is only counted once rather than each time they visit.
Returning Visitors- The number of visitors that come back to your site within a given time period.
Referring Sites- Other web sites that are sending visitors to your site through links.
So, that’s a quick look at what the metrics actually mean. I am most interested in looking at page views and returning visitors. To me, those two statistics tell me whether or not people are finding my blog useful.
Though this site is still in its absolute infancy, the site has a 75-20 ratio: 75% of visitors are new visitors and about 25% are returning visitors:
Popularity: 2% [?]
November 30th, 2005 at 10:55 am
This overview should be easy to understand as a beginner’s guide to what’s what in web site stats. I bet there’s a bit confusion when it comes to understanding stats within the growing weblog community.