The statistics that you get as part of the website hosting package from Cravenplan web design Salisbury is comprehensive and can be confusing; we hope this short explanation will help.

The statistics run on a rolling 30 day period, so if you look on the 19th of March you will see the statistics for the 19th February to the 18th of March. Other reports are available on request.

The General Statistics section has most of the information you will need for a good overview of your sites statistics, so you can see how your search engine optimisation and on-line marketing of your website is going, it is conveniently located at the top of the report just below the graph.

The General Statistics section is divided into several sections these are

Hits

This is the number of files that have been called from the server that your website is on, if you have a page with 5 pictures and some text then you will get 7 hits from 1 visit – 1 each for the 5 pictures, 1 for the text and 1 for the page.

Hits are not a good way of tracking the number of people to your site.

Page views

As the name suggests this is how many pages have been viewed on your site, it is not unusual for one visitor to look at a number of pages, so the page views can be 4 or 5 times the number of visitors.

In general it is good to have visitors looking at more than one page on your site as it helps them gain trust in you.

Visits

This is the number of times your site has been visited, this can be from a person just visiting once, the same person visiting more than once in a given month or from automated search engine programs called spiders.

The visits report is split so you can see how many times the site was visited, the average length of time the visit lasted, although this will also include spiders and so the times for people who visit are often longer than the average shown.

You can also see the number of spiders who visited the site, you want to keep the search engine spiders returning to your site as that means your new content will get indexed by the search engines quickly and people will be able to find the site in the search engines for more of your keywords.

Visitors

These are not necessarily people but it is probably best to think of them that way, as trying to drill down to the exact number of people who visited the site can drive you to distraction.

You can see in the visitors section that it is broken down into unique visitors – those who have not visited the site for more than 30 days.
Those who have visited once, so how many visitors visited the site once this month and finally how many have visited the site more than once in the past 30 days.

I hope this has helped you with any problems you had understanding the statistics from your site.

If you have any further questions a member of the search engine optimisation team will be more than happy to help you.

Alternatively Cravenplan offer a free statistics seminar that you are more than welcome to attend, contact us for more details and to register.