Website statistics

Why website statistics?

Website statistics generated by AWStats

Website statistics are a vital part of any website and online business. They tell you how many visitors your page has, which country they come from, what web browser they're using, how they found you and much more.

By analyzing this data you get the big picture of your website's reach, performance and user base. It's also very useful for identifying problems within your website such as pages that make your visitors leave or files that are not found.

Important statistics

Below statistics are used for measuring website size:

• Uniques - The number of unique visitors (IPs) that visited your website during a given time period. A person with a static IP visiting your website 50 times during a month will only count as 1 unique visit for that month.
• Visits - Total visits for a given time period including multiple visits by the same IP. Above example would count as 50 visits.
• Page views - The number of pages that have been loaded by your visitors.
• Hits - The number of server requests. A web page with 10 pictures will count as 11+ hits (the page itself + 10 pictures + anything else like CSS files).

The following statistics describe your user base:

• Country - It's always good to know where the majority of your traffic comes from. If you notice that 30% of your visitors come from Germany it might be a good idea to add a German language option to your website.
• Visits duration - Do your visitors find your site helpful and stay a while or do they close the browser window as soon as they land on your page?
• Top pages - Tells you which pages are viewed the most and which ones barely get any visits.
• Entry pages - Entry pages are the first page your visitors load when visiting your website.
• Exit pages - Exit pages are the last page they viewed before they left your website. If one of your pages has a particularly high exit rate it might be broken or otherwise unusable.
• Operating systems - Pretty self explanatory, you'll most probably have 90% Windows some Mac and a few exotics. When you start to see people accessing your homepage with a Sony PSP you know it's getting popular.
• Browsers - The web browsers your users view your website with.
• Links from external pages - This very useful stat lists all the external links to your site that people clicked. Maybe some blogger wrote about your site or someone made a forum post about you?
• Links from search engines - Find out how many people found your website using Google, Yahoo, MSN and other popular internet search engines.
• Search keyphrases and keywords - What keywords did people type into Google to find your website? These stats are very important for search engine optimization.

Website statistics software

There are 2 types of website statistics software:

• Log file based
• Script based

Log file based statistics software get all their information by analyzing the server log files that are automatically generated by the web server software (such as Apache). This is by far the most common way of gathering statistics. No cookies, scripts, etc are required on your website. To check your website stats you usually use a control panel to access the statistics software.

Script based statistics software gathers all the necessary information using scripts placed on your web pages. Such services are usually offered by 3rd party companies. All the information processing is done on their servers and you log onto their website to check your statistics.