Website Resource: Basics of Web Analytics of your Web Site

We often check the log files of our websites or use various analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, Mint and SiteMeter to name a few, for doing many different kinds of analysis, but not many of us understand the data being shown in the fancy looking web analytic softwares. One of my friend, recently asked me the difference between a visitor, new visitor and a unique visitor. Explaining the difference to him was easy and it gave me a good topic to write on. Here you go! Read the basics and look at the same data again and see if you find it looking different .

Visitor - An individual [and not a robot or piece of program] sending a request to your web server is a visitor. Some might consider requests and visits by robots and spiders also as visitors. This should generally be avoided for accurate and precise reporting. [Visitors can be unique, repeat or new. Every visitor makes visits to your site]

New Visitor - A visitor who has never made any prior visit to your site, within said period of time. [If you consider one month of data for analysis, a visitor who visited your website last month will show up as a new visitor for this month's data.]

Unique Visitor - A visitor whose request can be uniquely identified. Since the same visitor can make thousand visits to your site, he is identified as one unique visitor, during the period of time for which the data is considered. [A visitor visiting your site once in a month may be a unique visitor for one month period but is not a unique visitor if you consider an year worth of log data. He will then be identified as a unique visitor for an entire year.]

Repeat Visitor - A visitor who has previously visited your website or requested anything from your web server at least once during a said period of time. [Example: A visitor making his first visit to your site on 1st of the month is a new visitor and his subsequent visits are treated as repeat visits.]

Visits - A visitor visits your website and make request for many pages from your site. Such series of requests from the same client or a visitor is called as visits. [Example: 10 people making 340 visits, that could be 34visits/visitor].

Hits - The most misleading section of any website analytics program is ‘Hits’. A hit is a request for any type of file from your web server, such as request for a javascript file, image file, css file or any other identified file type. In particular, if your home page consists of 10 images, 1 css file and 1 .js file then one request for your home page should be considered as 13 hits -> [1html+10images+1css+1js]. Since a page can have many different things attached to it, one should not rely on ‘Hits’ for any kind of measurement for your website. A home page consisting of 50 images may have 50 visitors for which log analysis may show 2500 hits. This should never be treated as number of visitors. [Use hits, for getting a feeling of how much bandwidth is being consumed and for nothing else ]

Page Views - Any file being delivered as a result of a request from a client is called a page view. Such file requests can be for a html, php, audio, PDF and many other identified file types. Images, javascript and CSS files are excluded from being counted as a page view depending upon the web analytic software in use.

I hope you found this information useful. Please share your thoughts, suggestions and help me improve