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Website Statistics: Facts and Fallacies

Written by: Mathew Georghiou

Article Overview: Website statistics are often misused and misinterpreted. Hits, for example, is perhaps the most misused statistic of all. How many times have you heard someone boast that his/her website receives X thousands or millions of hits. Read on to find out more.

Website Statistics: Facts and Fallacies

Website statistics can be very helpful in monitoring visitors — and visits — to your website. They can help you maintain a record and determine what is of most and least interest to visitors by telling you what is being viewed most often and for the longest periods of time.
Website statistics, however, are often misunderstood.

“Hits” for example, are not an accurate representation of visits to a website. In fact, a hit only represents the number of times a file (html, graphic, etc.) has been sent from your web server to a visitor's browser (viewing a single page on a website will often register 10 or more hits). While an increase in hits does represent greater activity on a website, it does not directly equate to the number of visitors.

The reality is that most statistics are not accurate, due to the nature of the Internet. The only way to collect completely accurate statistics is to develop a sophisticated visitor tracking system, and force users to log in to your website each time they visit. Of course, this is far beyond the ability and need of most organizations.

Even though most statistics are not accurate, they are still beneficial in determining trends. For example, if you run a promotion during a certain period of time, you can check to see if there is a corresponding increase in activity on your website.

Here are a few of the most useful statistics:

Unique Visitors
Probably the most relevant statistic, it represents the number of individual visitors to your website.

Returning Visitors
This tells you how often the same visitors return to your website.

Referrers
These are the other websites that include a link to yours, as well as search engines that referenced your website under specific keyword searches.

Page Views
This tells you how often specific web pages were viewed, and enables you to determine most and least popular.

Paths
These are the routes most visitors use to navigate through your website.

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