Checking Your Web Stats

It is important that you know how many people visit your site. Most ISPs will provide some form of statistics (web stats) to help you assess this. But reading web stats is a skill and without some basic knowledge you can easily be misled.

Hits

Most web stats formats show a count of hits on your site. Do not confuse this with the number of visitors to your site - it is actually a count of the number of file requests received by the web server over the period. Every time a page is viewed all the component files have to be transmitted from the Web site host computer to the viewer's one. Each file request is a 'hit'.

Page Views

A more representative figure, and one gaining popularity, is page views. As the name suggests, this shows the number of whole pages delivered by the web server over the period. Of course, a visitor could view one page or many, so this figure doesn't give you an accurate measure of the number of visitors.

Unique Visitors

Some service providers will provide a figure of the number of unique visitors, which is probably the best guide to visitor numbers to your site.

Reading the Stats

Your ISP will probably be able to supply a variety of additional statistics, which may clarify the situation or cause confusion. In general, the best approach is to select a small number of figures - say, hits and page views - and watch how they develop, rather than rely on absolute numbers. You can then tell if visitor numbers grow steadily, tail off, respond to an offline promotion, and so on.