Understanding your website stats

All of our web hosting packages include web statistics, using the popular AWStats sofware.  This document explains the terminology used in the reports.

Items of specific note are:

Unique Visitors
Number of Visits
Pages
Pages/Visit
Hits
Bandwidth

Here is a brief explanation of these terms:

Unique Visitors – A unique visitor is a person that has made at least 1 hit on 1 page of a web site during each day or period shown on the report. If this user makes several visits during this period, it is counted only once. Visitors are tracked by IP address, so if multiple users are accessing your site from the same IP (such as a home or office network), they will be counted as a single unique visitor.

Number of Visits – The number of visits is the total number of visits by all visitors over a given period of time.  For example, if I visit your site once, and then come back 4 more times, you should see one unique visit and 5 total visits from me.

Pages – This is the total number of pages viewed by visitors. This does not include images, JavaScript or CSS and the like; just HTML/web page files.

Pages/Visit – This is the total number of pages (on average) viewed by visitors in a given visit to the site.

Hits – This is every file requested by the visitor. This includes pages and images together. If you have a page with 2 images calling a java script file the page will generate a total of 4 hits. The most common referenced stat used and one that is virtually meaningless (and useless). The more appropriate numbers to consider are both ‘number of visitors’ and ‘unique visitors’ (see above).

Bandwidth – The total number of bytes downloaded. If you have a page that has 50 KB of text, 2 images at 24 and 32 KB then each visitor to that page will take 106 KB of your bandwidth.