Web stats refer to statistics produced by the
online statistical program offered with your Web Hosting package. They provide you
detailed, reasonably accurate information about visitors to your website like
hits, unique visitors, page views, referrers, etc.
Following is a list of general terminology
pertaining to different aspects of your web statistics.
Hits
Hits represent the total number of requests made to the server during the given
time period (month, day, hour etc..).
Files
Files represent the total number of hits (requests) that actually resulted in
something being sent back to the user. Not all hits will send data, such as
404-Not Found requests and requests for pages that are already in the browsers
cache.
TIP - By looking at the difference between hits and files, you can get
a rough indication of repeat visitors, as the greater the difference between the
two, the more people are requesting pages they already have cached (viewed
already).
Sites
Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the
server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than
that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear
to come from many IP addresses so it should be used simply as a rough gauge as
to the number of visitors to your server.
Pages
Pages are those URLs that would be considered the actual page being requested,
and not all of the individual items that make it up (such as graphics and audio
clips). Some people call this metric page views or page impressions,
and defaults to any URL that has an extension of .htm, .html or .cgi.
Visits
Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for
the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given
timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site
makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is
greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit
is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger
a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be
counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
