How to Read Web or Blog Stats

Blog Stats, Blogging Tips, Internet Tutorials, SEO Tutorials, Technology, Website Stats

Analyzing traffic statistics is an important thing of maintaining a business blog or website, but they can be confusing you, especially when you are not certain what it is precisely the numbers mean. Here is some abridged explanation on how to read stats effectively:

1. Hits
Hits are very misleading because they don't equal people. That hit is tracked for every file loaded each time your page is loaded. This means each image is tracked as a hit, so if you have a blog heavy with images, each time a visitors loads that page, you are getting a some amount of hits.

2. Page Views
Page views count per visitor because they are tracked every time a new page is loaded. Knowing page views is useful because that can help you to determine how long visitors are staying on your
website once they arrive. Did they find your website and leave immediately or did they stick around and read more your archives? If you are tracking your blog or website, this is important to know if the information you are displaying hooked them in to learn more about you and your website, or if they got bored and went on to the next website on their list.

3. Unique Visitors
Unique visitors are very important because they represent individual visitors accessing your website within certain time frames. This number can sometimes be skewed by visiting via a website that masks their IP address or people resetting cookies, but this is generally the most accurate measure of real traffic to your site. Your unique visitor numbers will commonly be lower than your monthly visitor numbers or daily visitor numbers because it does not count someone if they visit your site three or four times in one day, whereas the other two count each visit, unique or not.

4. Return Visitors
Return visitors are the other number to monitor because they show how many visitors are coming back, which shows how large your consistent visitor actually is. This is an very important statistic to measure because it means visitors want to know what you have to say regularly.

Blog Stats, Blogging Tips, Internet Tutorials, SEO Tutorials, Technology, Website Stats