Page counts and Visitors
by David on Monday 7th September, 2009 at 10:09 COMMENTS (0)
Have you ever received an email from an advertiser or marketer claiming that they have thousands of hits per day and that this proves beyond doubt that they are the most popular website around?
We all have, they say that 19,000-30,000 hits per week, or even per day, is typical and therefore if you advertise with them you will be seen by all these people.
Well lets break it down and work out what those hits actually mean shall we.
Firstly the most important thing is to understand what hits actually means.
'Page views' or 'Page hits' actually shows how many times a page has been viewed on a website, whether by thousands of people viewing one page or just one person viewing lots of pages.
If you find a website with a page counter try refreshing or reloading the page a few times and see what happens, the page counter most likely will increase every time you do this. It is counting every time the page is being loaded or refreshed not how many visitors there are.
A page counter is worthless as it is no indication as to how many different visitors there have been to a website.
This can only be derived from a unique visitor counter, this is where every visitor is tracked and counted only once, this kind of counter will show the count as 1 no matter how many times you refresh or reload a page.
There are many analytic systems that do this, also known as web statistics or web stats systems, the most poular or well know is Google Analytics
These vary in complexity and accuracy but most break down the visitors into categories.
As equally important is how many bots or search engine robots are visiting a site to spider or 'have a look around' as these are not interested in your adverts or articles, they just gather information for use on another website.
Most good analytic or stats systems differentiate between bots and browsers by counting the known browsers as these are used by people rather than bots.
Another very important factor is how long someone stays on your site, this is known as the 'bounce rate', someone visits a site, takes a quick look and finds it is not for them, then leaves without really visiting. Should these even be counted as visitors?
As a web master it is good to know how many 'Page views' your site gets as this impacts on the server and bandwidth costs, but it is of no use to anyone who wants to advertise on a site.
Another factor is spammers who visit sites to either submit details to a form or forum linking back to the spammers website or to add a referrer link to that sites stats system which looks like a genuine visitor has clicked on a site link from the spammers website. For this reason it is not a good idea to count contact or form pages in a unique visitor count as many of these spammers use random details to look unique each time they visit.
Unique visitors using a browser who stay longer than 10 seconds are important as these are real people who may click on your advert.
If you want to advertise on a website then an important question to ask is how many unique visitors do you get, not how many page hits.
Hope this helps.
Filed under: CMS Search_Engines Stats
Search Engine feature added to CMS
by David on Friday 7th November, 2008 at 15:11 COMMENTS (0)
The new search engine feature has now been added, allowing you to see exactly what search terms have been used to find your website.
... Read further about Search Engine feature added to CMSNew Stats feature added
by David on Tuesday 4th November, 2008 at 11:11 COMMENTS (0)
When our CMS emails us weekly stats details showing all the relevant details over the past 2 weeks it can show many things, one of which is the searches made on the site.
... Read further about New Stats feature addedStats Updates
by David on Friday 5th September, 2008 at 10:09 COMMENTS (0)
Update to the stats system to show more relevant details.
... Read further about Stats Updates
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