We all know that it's important to expose as many potential customers to our websites as possible, but how do you make sense of what the statistics all mean?
Following is a brief summary of some of the terms you'll come across when using the SmarterStats website statistics package offered by Lateral to clients who host with us. These terms will probably also be familiar with clients who host elsewhere and use a different statistics package.
Page Views
As the name implies, this refers to the number of times pages on your site have been viewed during a specified time period. If it showed 1,000 page views, it may be 1000 different people viewing one page once or 500 people viewing two different pages or simply 1 person viewing one page a thousand times or a 1 person viewing a thousand different pages.
Visits
This refers to the number of times your site has been visited during a specified time period. It may include people who've visited the site more than once during that time period. Different to page views, it doesn't calculate the number of pages which were visited, just the fact that the actual site has been visited.
Return visits
In terms of total visits to the site, this statistic calculates the number of people who've returned to your site during a specified time period. For commonly visited sites there will often be a large number of return visitors.
Unique visits
Similar to total visits during a specified time period, the unique visitors statistic calculates the total number of unique people (or computers via their cookies) who've visited your website. It does not take into account those people who've visited more than once in the time period. It is said to give a better indication of the total number of your website audience.
Hits
Hits refer to the number of times an object (this could be an image, a page etc) is served up when someone visits a page or pages on your site. Image heavy sites often show thousands of hits in website statistics and some companies will incorrectly refer to their 'hits' as their website traffic. For this very reason, we recommend that you refer to total number of page views as the best indicator of your website traffic.
Entry page
These statistics show you through which page URL your audience is entering your website. A common entry point for many websites is often the home page URL as it is promoted heavily offline, however viral campaigns or particular marketing campaigns can see an increase in the number of users entering through alternative URLs.
Exit page
Similar to entry pages, these statistics show you through which page URL your audience is most likely to exit your website. This is can be a helpful indicator of what content is working for you.
Browsers & Browser versions
The browser statistics show you which internet browsers and browser versions your audience are using to view your website. This information is particularly helpful when it comes to testing your website for new deployments or determining how many of your audience may be affected if there are any issues with a particular browser in the future.
Next time you analyse your website statistics, we hope that the above information helps make it more useful.