Understanding Website stats

funkyphantom

funkyphantom

funkyphantom

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4 Oct 2004
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Hi, Ive just been looking at the stats of the website i have just been co-opted into running and dont really understand the statistics. Could anyone help me understand them?
What exactly is a 'hit'? is this the number i should be looking for? in terms of 'website popularity'? or should i be looking at the 'uniques'? if so, what do each of these mean?
I've included a copy of my website results for the month of August to help you explain.
Thanks

Usage Statistics

Monthly Statistics for August 2010 Total Hits 69103
Total Files 50006
Total Pages 7730
Total Visits 2293
Total KBytes 1335115
Total Unique Sites 1456
Total Unique URLs 234
Total Unique Referrers 200
Total Unique User Agents 85

Is this a busy site on average? Or not really?
 
A "hit" is a file downloaded from your site - this includes HTML files, images, stylesheets, downloads, etc. It's not a particularly useful statistic on its own, as one page view could generate literally dozens of hits.

Total visits (2293) is the best place to start. This is the number of distinct visits that users made to your site during the month. 2,000 is a decent number for a small site, but it's small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

Total pages (7730) is the number of page views served to those 2293 visitors.

Note that unless otherwise specified, these are not unique values - so those 2293 visits could have been generated from just 229 different people visiting 10 different times each. No way to tell with the information you've posted. A decent stats tool should give you more info - what are you actually using to get these stats? If it's just a basic script analysing your web server logs, you should add Google Analytics to your site - totally free and it will give you crazy volumes of data, very very useful indeed.

Some good numbers to look for if you have them:
Unique Visitors - how many unique people visited the site?
Average Pageviews / Visit - how many pages did a user look at on each of their visits?
Time on site - on average, how long did users spend reading your site before they left?

What kind of site is it - forum, blog, e-commerce, etc?
 
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First of all, thanks for taking the time to explain.
The website is'nt mine (well i guess it kinda is now) the guy who looked after it has since left, the website is for a golf club and he has resigned his membership for one reason or another.
The site has been handed over to me. At the moment it looks a mess and im in the middle of (trying) to create a new one for them.
The stats are from the webhosting company via my control panel.
At the moment i am intergrating a system called 'gcgold' into the site, which means members will be able to enter competitions, view handicaps, view competition results etc etc which should bring quite a few more folks to the site providing we advertise it enough.
I'll look into installing 'google analytics'
Thanks again.
 
get a google account. google analytics, google webmaster tools are great things to use and free. google is probably the king of free stuff to help you understand visitors etc.
 
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