Website Statistics

Each website has full page tracking showing who is accessing your pages, where they are coming from and what they are looking at.

We have tried to simplify the stats so it is useful but not confusing, although everyone seems to be confused about what the stats mean. Before we explain the stats, you should understand some traffic basic definitions.

Page Views - This is the number of times a page or pages were viewed. This is not the number of people visiting your website only the number of pages that those people have looked at. For example, someone is shopping and they look at 30 different items, that could be more than 30 pages views but it was still only one visitor or one person.

Unique Visitors - Unique visitors is based on computer ip addresses over a 24 hour period. This counts the ip addresses and gives you a better outlook on the number of people visiting your website not to be confused with the number of pages they actually looked at.

Refering Urls - Each time a visitor clicks from one page to another you can see where they came from. If they are already on your website we do not count that. What we are looking for is if they are coming from search engines or outside websites. This is important to see where your business is coming from so you know if ads are working and what the return is on money you are spending on advertising.

Now lets look at what your management console will show you.

To access your web stats look for the "Web Stats" icon at the top of the management console. Click on that icon for the main stats menu.

You will see an option to view stats by day or to get a summary for the entire month. We will skip right to the entire month. The stats are the same, but you wil have more data in a month than any given day and it will make more sense.

Now we select the month we are looking at the stats for. Normally the system will store 6 months of data so you can look at trends and how your traffic is improving or possibly declining.

We have selected one f our sample websites marksusedcar.com to take the screen caps from. We will view the stats for November 2007. We can't show the full page so we will show the last 2 days, the summary and the top few referrers.

Looking at the screencap above you will see on November 29th we had 83 people come to our website and viewed a total of 559 pages. We have a summar total for the enire month showing 2201 visitors for the month viewing 8600 pages.

Where are those 2000+ people comming from? If you look at the refering urls you will see google search sent us 836 people another 33 clicked on our sample page and clicked over to see marksusedcar.com, 29 people from AOL's Search and 28 people from used car classified buzztrader.com. We even had 32 people from google Canada. There are more down the page, but we are only showing the top referrers.

Each item will link to the website so you can click over and see the link back to your website and why you have the traffic.

Your stats will also show you which pages were viewed. Each url that was viewed will be listed with the number of times it was viewed. If you had 500 page views in one day, it is alot of data to look at and more than we are going to display on this help page.

That should give you a general overview of what the data means and how to use it.

If you are paying for ads at somesite.com, you can see if you are getting traffic from thse ads. If you are not seeing any results in your stats you know not to pay for the ads.

Additional Notes:

Referal Spam - Sometimes spammers will send traffic to your website from their pages to get listed in your web stats getting you to click over to their website. Generally this is fake traffic and you should not consider the referals in your analysis. In most cases, there is no link on the page shown in your stats and it is just a trick to get you to their website.

Favicon - You may see accesses to a favicon which is a file that some browsers look for in very website. It is not relavent in most websites and the browser will just ignore it if the file is not available, but the request will still be logged.

404 File Not Found - You have no doubt seen 404 errors on the web. A page that was indexed in the search engines and has since been removed from the website. You generally get a blank page. However, in our case we redirect all traffic to the home page. Rather than telling the potential client the page does not exist, we send them to your home page so they can enjoy your website. The result will be a listing in your stats with the page, image or file name despite the fact that the file has been removed or renamed. This is critical in preserving your web traffic and allowing you to see which files or pages you may want to restore.