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Welcome to the Midcoast Internet Domain Statistics tutorial. Your Virtual Domain web-hosting package includes a full statistics suite. The information contained therein will tell you where visitors are coming from, how they found you, who's linking to you, how many visits you had, and lots more. This information can be extremely useful if you use it and understand it. These pages are here to help you understand and utilize your statistics. (Note: When you log into your detailed stats, everything will be combined in one very long page. We've set our tutorial up in smaller sections with individual pages. This helps keep load time low, and allows you to easily move within the various sections. We've also color-keyed our text. Our instructions--which of course won't be on your page--are in this dark blue. Variables--items that will change based on your website name and date--will be in dark red. Black text will be what you WILL see when you log into your stats.) When you first log into your detailed stats, you'll see a heading like this: Usage Statistics for www.your-domain.comSummary Period: December 2005Generated 01-Jan-2006 01:01 EST [Daily Statistics] [Hourly Statistics] [URLs] [Entry] [Exit] [Sites] [Referrers] [Search] [Agents] [Countries] (The links above will move you through the deferent points of our tutorial. Click HERE to go to the first page)
This table shows your total monthly statistics. Total hits shows the total number of hits your website received. Although this number is usually the most publicized, it's not really the most helpful. All files served will register a hit. For a simple example, lets say you have a webpage with three pictures on it. Every time that page viewed, you'll get four hits: one for the page itself, and one for each of the three photos. Total Files will show you the total number of files served from your website. In reality, this isn't really that helpful either. Total Pages--now we're into something we can use! This number shows us the number of pages viewed. Image files aren't counted here. In our example, we can see 3928 pages were viewed in this month. This is the most accurate variable in determining how "popular" your site is. Total Visits measures how many times someone came and looked at your site. Let's use our page with three images example again. A visitor may come and look at four pages on your site. That's one visit, four page views, and 12 hits. If they come back the next day and look at two more pages, then you'll get another visit (for a total of two), two more page views (for a total of six), and six more hits (for a total of 18). Make sense? In our stats above, we see we received 3928 page views and 701 visits. If we do a little math, we'll see that each person (visit) looked at (on average) 5.6 pages. You may have heard the term "sticky" regarding websites. A "sticky" site means when people visit, they tend to look around. If you can average three page views per visit, you're doing well. Our average of 5.6 is quite good! Total KBytes is a measurement of how much data we transferred. Usually, a higher number is better, as that means your site is generating traffic. For the average user, though, it's not too useful. Also not really that useful (unless you're really geeky) are the Total Unique Sites, Total Unique URLs, Total Unique Referrers, and Total Unique User Agents. In the next graph down, you'll see averages of various variables. Now that you know the deference between a hit and a visit, you should be able to interpret these yourself. The Max column you'll see your maximum for that particular variable. In our example, we averaged 22 visits per day. But one day we had 41, and that's reported in the Max column. The next graph down will show you Hits by Response Code. Most of these aren't really useful. Some useful ones would be:
Click the links at the top of the page to explore other stat areas! Questions or comments? Email jt@midcoast.com, or call 207-594-8277. |
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