Understanding Your Website Statistics

This guide will walk you through how to view your website's statistics. If at any time while you are following these steps and you become concerned or confused, just call - 877-932-7496.

	Accessing Your Online Statistics Page
	Understanding Your Statistics

Accessing Your Online Statistics Page

1. In your web browser go to your stats page - (ex: http://www.yourwebsite.com/stats)
2. Your stats page is commonly provided by your web designer, or you can click here to request one.

Understanding Your Statistics

1. The Stats Page is separated into two parts; an outline view (A) on the left and the reports (B) on the right. The left outline view can be used to quickly skip to a section.
   
2. At the very top of the page you can adjust the month of statistics you want to view for the whole page.
   (or Select Year for the total statistics for that selected year)
   
3. Summary:
   Here you will find the overall traffic count for your selected month (or year) broken into different categories.
   (Disregard the Traffic not viewed row)
   
   Definitions:
   Unique visitors:
   This is a more precise way to measure visitors to your site. Each person visiting your site is counted only once, regardless of how many times they visit. This is a way to measure how wide an audience you are reaching.
   Number of visits:
   This is one of the more useful metrics. A visit includes all the pages viewed by a visitor to your site. Visits begin when a person enters the site and end when the same visitor leaves the site or remains idle for a period of time (usually 30 minutes). Usually, one person visiting your site 30 times is counted the same as 30 people visiting one time each.
   Pages:
   Page views are a much better indication of Web site traffic. A page view includes all the embedded images and other files in a Web page. Understanding how many page views and which pages are being viewed is important in gauging the overall popularity of a site, and the popularity of specific pages.
   Hits:
   A hit is created when your Web server delivers a file to someone's browser. A Web page is usually made up of many files. These can include HTML files, photos, background images, Flash movies, ads, and more. So, when someone visits your homepage once, they call up many files and create many hits.
   Bandwidth:
   Total file size that has been used from visitors to the website. (Not very important)
4. Monthly History, Days of Month, Days of Week, Hours:
   These sections break the site visitor statistics down to Month, Weeks, Day, and even by Hour. This can give you a feel of when visitors are frequenting your website. This can be a good way to judge the effectiveness of certain types of promotions you maybe running.
5. Visitors Domains/Countries (Top 10):
   This displays where your visitors are coming from. Generally .com and .net will be the most common, but it will also report any foreign country visitors by their country code.
   

1. Hosts (Top 10):
   The hosts section displays the top 10 hosts that have visited the site. These are normally users, but in some cases can be search engines and other spidering programs. This will only give the host IP address.
   
2. Robots/Spiders Visitors (Top 10):
   Robots or Spiders are used by search engines to explore websites and the pages within them. This section will display a list of robots/spiders that have visited your website. It also lists the last time the robot/spider came to the site. This information is very useful for SEO (Search Engine Optimization). This also lets a user know which major search engines haven’t indexed their site, so they can submit to them.
   
3. Visits Duration:
   The visits duration will display the average amount of time users stay on the site. This is useful to find out if users are actually staying on the site and using the information provided, or just looking over the site and then leaving. This section will display the number of visits for each time duration, along with the percentage of traffic it makes up. Each time duration is measured in minutes;
   

1. File Type:
   This section shows the different types of files that are access on the website. It will show the hits the file type received along with it’s percentage of the traffic. This will also show the amount of bandwidth this type of file consumes and the percentage it uses of the total bandwidth used for that month. This is a good section to find out what files are using the most bandwidth.
   
2. Pages-URL (Top 10):
   Each time a user visits a page within your website, the system will log where they have gone. So if a user visits the homepage the most, it will be displayed as number one on this section. Viewed is the amount of times users have accessed this page. The line listed as "/" is the website's home page.

   For SEO (Search Engine Optimization) the Entry and Exit section is can also be very useful. The “Entry” section shows how many users enter the site on that given page compared to the total “Viewed” number. This number is how many users have loaded that page first. The “Exit” section is the same thing, but it shows how many users exited the site from that given page.

3. Operating Systems and Browsers (Top 10):
   The operating systems and browser section is just how it sounds. It will display different operating systems and internet browsers and the amount of users that use them. This section also shows the amount of hits and the percentage of traffic that given configuration makes up. This is helpful in determining how many users can view the site the way it was meant to be viewed. Each browser for each operating system will display the site slightly differently. The vast majority of internet users are using Windows based computers with Microsoft Internet Explorer.
   
4. Connect to Site From:
   This section will give detailed information on how visitors got to your website. This can be very helpful to pinpoint where visitors are coming from.
   Direct Address/Bookmarks: This displays the number of visitors that have come from their own bookmarks or have typed the address directly through their browsers. These are mostly your return visitors.
   Links From a NewsGroup: Visitors who came from any news group directly to your website.
   Links from an Internet Search Engine: This shows which search engines are linking to your site and the amount of traffic that is being generated from that given search engine. Click full list to see all search engines that generated traffic to your website.
   Links From an External Page: This section will list links from other sites instead of search engines. This could be your sites affiliates’, anyone linking to your site, or anything other then search engines.
   
5. Search Keyphrases and Keywords (Top 10):
   This is one of the most important sections of the statistic page. This will display key phrases that visitors have used to access the website. The keywords section will show those individual words that lead to the website. Each section will display the amount of searches for each key word of phrase used along with the percentage of traffic it accounts for.
   
6. Miscellaneous:
   This section displays the amount of users that have bookmarked your website. The first number is the number of favorites added compared to the amount of visits.
   
7. HTTP Error Codes:
   This section displays different errors that have occurred for visitors to your site. This section also displays the amount of hits each error received along with it’s percentage of traffic it accounts for. This can be a good way for finding any broken or links not working on your website.