Web Statistics are log files that measure the behaviour of visitors and track details of your website. This is a useful tool for businesses as it measures and qualifies aspects of the website working towards business objectives. Highlighting which landing pages most effectively encourage people to make a purchase. Website statistics can show trends in user behaviour, for example when you've made changes to your site, or the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.
The web analytics service also manages the process of assigning a cookie to the user, which can uniquely identify them during their visit and in subsequent visits.
At their core, these services analyse the usage and current data. Thus producing configurable, numerical and graphical reports based on website traffic, usability, navigation, access and usage logs. The graphical mapping can be presented by different time frames, such as daily, hourly and monthly.
To effectively measure the success of campaigns, outbound emails, sales and marketing efforts these can be compared with website usage to ascertain its success. A good analytics program will also provide the clickstream data, illustrating the path your visitor’s took within your site, from page to page. This data is invaluable for effectively marketing your site, product or service.
Understanding the terminology
Unique Visitor
A unique visitor is a host that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of your Website during the current period shown by the report. If this host make several visits during this period, it is counted only once.
The period shown by AWStats reports is by default the current month.
NOTE: Unique Visitors is a misnomer. This variable actually reports Unique Hosts. You can't find out the number of visitors or visits you've had, and don't believe any program which tells you that you can.
Unique Hosts measures the number of Computers that connected with your website and includes dial-up POP servers. Because an ISP may have 100's of users connecting to each of its local POP's, Unique Visitors is a much bigger number than Unique Hosts.
Visits
Number of visits made by all visitors.
Think "session" here, say 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)
Pages
The number of "pages" logged. Only files that don't match an entry in the NotPageList config parameter (and match an entry of OnlyFiles config parameter if used) are counted as "Pages". Usually pages are reserved for HTML files or CGI files, not images nor other files requested as a result of loading a "Page" (like js,css... files).
Hits
Any files requested from the server (including files that are "Pages") except those that match the SkipFiles config parameter.
See instructions for accessing your Website Statistics. |
