Statistics is a whole lot more than just that one class in highschool everyone slept through. The stats of your site can enlighten you in many ways once you understand the information that you can collect and how to apply that information to your website development. Statistics help you to achieve your ever so precious ROI or Return on Investment. Most every web host offers one type of statistics tracking or another.

Google has a free service called Analytics that is the best program I have used. I do not work for Google; however, when a company with their reputation puts out a free product this great I have to spread the news. This isn't new information by any means but for new webmasters it is a must know. I will go over in more detail the important information you can get out of the system.

First lets talk about statistics. Anytime a visitor hits your website most all web hosts will record that information. There is a ton of information that is accumulated. Some of it very important and some of it isn't. It is important to know what statistics you are looking at. Here are some of the terms to know.

Hits = A browser requesting a file from your website. Each individual file is one hit. So if your home page has 3 pictures, one stylesheet, two javascripts and the main html page the total hits would equal 7 anytime you had one page view.

Page Views = When a visitor requests a page from your site. Many hits make up a page view. This will basically tell you how many times a page was looked at by your visitors. While you cannot specifically tell which page a specific visitor looked at there are ways to "trend" your visitors.

Unique Visitors = This is how many different computers have accessed your website. If someone returns to your site their hits and page views will still be counted; however, their computer's hostname has already been recorded so they would be considered a "return visitor". These are very nice to have. If I have some then thank you for revisiting. =)

Top URLs = Will show you which pages are most requested.

Top Entry Pages = This tells you where people are entering your site. Not everyone will enter from your home page. If someone bookmarks one of your articles and uses that link to return to your site it will be noted as the entry page for that visit. These would be considered popular pages

Top Exit Pages = This is the same as the Top Entry Pages except these are the pages people are most often leaving from. This could be a positive aspect or a negative aspect depending on your site's goals. If you see a content page that many people are leaving from I would review that page for improvement.

 Top Referrers = This is stellar information. This is what tells you where your visitors are finding your site if they don't type it in directly or find it via a search engine. Many sites link back and forth with each other to share traffic. If someone clicks on a link to your site from another site the other site is recorded as a referrer for that visitor. There are a ton of possibililities for using this information.

Google Analytics takes it one step farther. http://www.google.com/analytics They have orgainzed the above information into meaningful sections and provide a great "dashboard" to keep an eye on the most watched statistics for your site. This is all of course customizable.

The good think about the Analytics is that you can allow more than one person to access your information. This way you can have consultants review your statistics to help make recommendations. Statistics is one of the first things I review with my clients. Especially those who didn't know they existed.

If you need help with your website's statistics please contact me and let me know.