Your Website Traffic Statistics: What You Need To Know

Once you have set up a system to monitor traffic to your website, you are only a small part of the way to being able to use this information to your advantage.

Do you know what to do with website statistics? Do you even know what you are looking at when you look over your website traffic stats? If not, don't feel bad - you are not alone.

Here's a crash course on what you need to know about your website traffic statistics - and how you can use it to increase your online business presence.

Most website hosting services have some sort of traffic statistic program. Many automatically link those to your site once you sign up. Other web hosting companies have you sign up for these and add the code to your site.

The main thing to learn in order to understand web traffic statistics is what all those terms mean. Once you understand what the statistics translate to, you will be able to easily understand what they're telling you.

Visitors

There are two types of visitors that will come to your website - unique visitors and return visitors. Thanks to advances in Internet technology, when someone comes to your site, a cookie will be added to his or her computer.

When that visitor returns to your site, the system will recognize them as a repeat visitor. This is a great tool to know how many new prospects are coming to your site and to learn if you are doing a good enough job at marketing and offering items they want to get them to come back.

Visits

Some web stat systems also log the number of visits to your site. While you may think this statistics is the same as the 'visitors' stat above, it is not.

This is the total number of times anyone visits your page. If the same person were to come to your page 100 times, the website statistics program would log that as 100 visits.

This stat is somewhat misleading, as it can make you think more people are seeing your site than really are.

Hits

If your web statistics have 'hits' as one of the categories, you may look at the number under this column and think your website is on fire. You would also be mistaken.

Hits are not the number of times people look at a page on your site. Hits add up all the individual items people see on your site. For example, if you have a homepage that has five pictures and three pieces of HTML code that have to be loaded for them to see, that will count as eight hits on your site - even though it may be just one person viewing one page.

Page View

Page views tell you how many of your web pages have been seen. A page view counter will let you know when someone looks at a whole page, not just the hits on objects on that page.

This number will give you a much clearer picture of just how many people are looking at each portion of your site.

Referral Site

Ever wonder how people are finding your website? Looking at referral site statistics will let you know. This stat will let you know what site sent them to yours.

Once you know how people are finding your website, if they're sticking around and whether they're coming back, you can start to deduce what parts of the site they like and don't like.

You'll also be able to determine what changes you need to make to keep your site popular with unique and repeat visitors.