Be One With The Log

To analyze visitors to a page , you should be looking at your server logs. Server logs come in very raw data, but most hosting businesses have interpreting programs that summarize the understanding into readable form. From these programs, you should be able to analyze who is sending you traffic, the number of hits and visitors among other data .

Hits v. Visitors - The Game Is On

Many everybody, myself included, are lazy when it comes to discussing visitors results. We tend to utilize "hits" as a catch phrase for visitors hitting a website. This isnt entirely true. Traffic should always be analyzed in two categories, hits and visitors.

A "visitor" is a click from someplace on the net to your web page . In your server logs, a visitor will be credited with visiting the page one time regardless of the number of pages the visitor views. For example, a human entering a brick n mortar bookstore is only one potential customer regardless of the number of books the person looks at.

A "hit" is a click on any page of the page and represents a multiple of the visitors. When you review server logs, the hits represent how many times visitors clicked page pages. Going back to our bookstore example, every book viewed by the human in the bookstore would be a hit. So, which information is more important?

Hits v. Visitors - An The Winner Is

The simple fact is both visitors and hits are important statistics to analyze in your server logs. Obviously, the understanding on the number of visitors is important because you want to understand how many potential customers are coming to your web site. That being said, you should never focus on visitors without contemplating hits as well.

Hits are important because the number of hits tells you very important understanding about your page . Since hits represent the total number of pages viewed by all visitors, you may make use of the acquired skill to determine the effectiveness of your site. I call this by the very original and sophisticated name "hits to visitors ratio." Lets go back to our bookstore example.

Assume a person walks into a bookstore and only looks at one book. This can mean the person knew what they wanted, found it and bought it. Obviously, this is an ideal result. But what if a thousand many people stroll into the bookstore and only look at one book each? The bookstore would have a problem and start trying to figure out what it is. The hits statistics on your server tell you the same thing.

If your web page has multiple pages, you need to find out if visitors are clicking into the internal pages. This is often known as determining the depth of your web page . The simplest way to do this is to divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for a particular time period. This figure will tell you if everybody are seeing one "book" or taking a look around.

Analyzing your server stats might be a real eye-opening experience. The information could be sizeably successful or bad, but at minimum you will understand if any corrective steps need to be taken.