What Your Statistics Mean
Generally statistics present the same information to business owners. The information below is based on awstats.
Key Definitions and Meanings
- Referrers: Referring sites are those Web sites that visitors have visited before arriving at your site via an external link. Referrals from www.tourism.net.nz (The New Zealand Tourism Guide) for accommodation providers, for example, would be seen as something like:
https://www.tourism.net.nz/listings/frame/accommodation/22948
By looking at your referrers, you can see how many potential customers are being sent your way by other Web sites such as www.tourism.net.nz, www.jasons.com, www.finda.co.nz, www.aatravel.co.nz, etc.
View a typical statistics page showing referring sites.
- Unique visitors: A unique visitor refers to each different IP address visiting your site during the given period. For example, a site can have 1,000 unique visitors generating 50,000 hits in a day.
- Pages: A page view refers to the viewing of a Web page on a Web site. The number of page views will reveal how many times a page was viewed or how many pages were viewed on the whole site. For example, a unique visitor could produce 10 page views and 50 hits during a given visit.
- Hits / accesses: Hits refer to the number of times a file on a Web site is called up by a Web browser. (It can include the Web pages, graphics, etc.) It is not the same as the number of people who have been to your site. Some sites mistakenly associate hits with number of visitors. A single visitor can generate 50 hits, but 50 hits does not equal 50 visitors. Unique visitors is a better measure of the actual number of visitors to a site during a given period.
- Visits: A visit consists of one or more accesses made by the same visitor, with no more than a certain time interval between accesses. If a unique IP accesses a page, and then requests three others without an hour between any of the requests, all of the pages are included in the visit. Therefore, you should expect multiple pages per visit and multiple visits per unique visitor (assuming that some of the unique IPs are logged with more than an hour between requests). When the maximum time interval has elapsed, the visit is considered to be over, and the next access by that visitor begins a new visit.
Other Statistics
- When: Monthly history, Days of month, Days of week, Hours
This section breaks the statistics up into time periods, and shows the number of visits, number of pages visited and Web site hits.
- Who: Countries, Hosts, Robots/ spiders
This section shows you who your visitors are and which countries they are from.
- Navigation: Visits duration, File type, Operating systems and browsers
This section shows how long visits to your Web site were and which pages and files were accessed. If you look at the stats shown for the "/" page, it will show you how many people have viewed your home page.
- Referrers: Origin, Search
This section shows where visitors to your site have come from (from which third party Web sites and search engines) and how (i.e. what search phrases they are using).
- Others: Miscellaneous, HTTP status codes
This section shows an estimated number of visitors who have bookmarked your site and the number of times error codes have been given to visitors on your site.
More Information About Web Statistics
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