In my first post, I covered four basic components found in most statistics software. In this post, we will examine them more closely and also take a look at some more specific stats. An important way to gauge your website’s success is to look at the daily breakdown of those four components: number of visits, pages, hits, and bandwidth. Your graph may show certain days as having spikes, much higher than others. Find out what you did on that day and what content you posted.

Your statistics will also tell you which days of the week and hours of the day were the prime times for site visitors. Next, take a look at the breakdown of visitors by country. Hopefully, the country of your target audience will be first. If not, you might need to reevaluate your language policy and cultural references in your content.

You should have a section for “hosts”, including “top 25″ and “full list”. This is very important if you suspect security problems. Normally, you will have a few ip addresses with more hits than others, but if you have one or two that are extremely large compared to the others, you might have an attacker or someone attempting to attack.

Continue reading: Understanding Website Statistics: Part 2

Most web hosting providers provide statistical analysis software, such as Webalizer or Awstats. In all likelihood, some type of software is gathering data about your website, even if you did not previously know it or configure it. Now that you know about it or even if you already did, you need to know how to understand the terminology.

Hits: The most commonly-used term people throw around to brag about their websites is “hits”. People love boasting to their friends about how their website scores 300,000 hits per month. The fact is, however, that “hits” are not the most accurate way to tell how many website visitors you actually get. A hit is counted every time a single file (document, image, etc.) is accessed. That means a single visitor could conceivably be responsible for 500 hits, and those hits are registered each time the person visits.

Number of visits: A more accurate report of actual website traffic is “number of visits”. This is how many times someone visited your website. It could be a single person or multiple people. It will include you and also various search engine bots.

Continue reading: Understanding Website Statistics