| Anyyone who has a website should have the ability | | | | engines surfing the web to get information for their |
| to view a statistics report, usually generated to show | | | | listings. For the sake of simplicity, we'll just assume |
| statistics by day, week, and month. Many beginners | | | | below that visitors are people. |
| are under the impression they should look at how | | | | Most reports will show the number of unique visitors |
| many "hits" the website generates, but "hits" are not | | | | and number of visits. For example, you may have |
| actually human visits to your website but a | | | | 500 unique visitors but 800 visits. What that tells you |
| somewhat arbitrary number generated from a | | | | is that maybe 300 of your visitors came twice or |
| number of factors determined by information on the | | | | one visitor came 301 times or any other combination. |
| website that assigns points or "hits" to the page | | | | The number of unique visits you are attracting is |
| based on such items being on a page as images, | | | | good, but so are return visits. |
| stylesheets, and javascript files. For the beginner, this | | | | The number of pages visited should be a higher |
| can be confusing and isn't that important. | | | | number, perhaps 2,000 in this case, so you can |
| What you want to know is how many live people | | | | estimate that each of your 500 visitors looked at |
| are looking at your website and why. Even this isn't | | | | four of your website pages. You should also get |
| easy to determine since many visits are from search | | | | specific statistics for each page of your website. |