The
Myth between Hits and Page Views.
Most server side statistic reports are miss-leading. They present
you with a total of "hits" on your server. THIS IS NOT
the number of pages that your server presented. A single page can
cause multiple hits on a standard log report.
A single page may
contain 10 graphics. Every time that page is called your
server logs would record 11 hits. One for the page.html (document)
and one for each graphic that is contained on the page. For this
reason, your logs would report that you have had 11 hits.
Miss-leading to most. Some have
stated they have
10,000 hits a day, after checking their site logs it is determined they
have allot of graphics on their pages and actually they were
getting less than 1000 "Page Views" a day. A "Page
View" is the information with power! A "Page View"
is a single call for a single page no matter how many items are
contained on the page. This is a true representation of your
visitor traffic.
Hits - Every time any file
is requested from your server that counts as a hit. A single page
call can record many hits as every item on the page will be
registered (see above). Goldstats does not report server
"hits" so there is no miss-leading hits reports (they
mean nothing actually).
Page Views - This number
represents the total number of pages that were called no matter
how many items they each contain. This is a TRUE picture of how
many individual pages were viewed by your visitors.
Unique Visitors - Another
important number. "Unique Visitors" is the number of
different individuals that visited your web site. This number can
be divided into the "Page Views" to give you an average
number of pages that each visitor viewed. (eg: 1000 Page Views and
100 Unique Visitors means that you had 100 people visit your site
and they viewed an average of 10 pages a piece).
Help with stats reports
When you log in to your Goldstats Members Area you are presented
with the last 7 days summary information. You can zoom into a
specific day or review the total for the past 7 days. To help you
understand the way information is presented that you need to understand
the difference between Hits, Page Views and Unique Visitors.
At the bottom of every page you have
the summary reports.
"Daily Stats" button
will take you to a summary of the past 25 days breaking in to two
separate graphs. One report for your daily page views and one for
unique visitors.
"Daily Averages"
button will take you to a 7-day summary. We will average up to
the last 60 days traffic and give you a daily average of your
visitors. Here you can see what days your site is most or least
visited. It is an important too for an e-commerce site that may
notice that the majority of their sales happen on the weekends.
They can track this kind of trend.
"Monthly Stats" button
will display a total Page View graph and a Unique Visitor graph
for each month. From here you can see the monthly trends of your
site. You can also zoom in to any month specifically and see a
break down by day.
"Return To Goldstats
Log" button can be clicked at any time to return you to
the summary screen.
Daily Reports
LOG VIEW The log view is a list of your
visited pages, their rank of page views, Share (the percentage of
views total for that page), URL of the pages and a color graph
comparing them all. The bottom of the log view is a list of the
page views and details about each one.
The list of your sites URL will
either have a full URL of the page or a / symbol.
/ = Someone clicked on the back
button and returned to an index page.
ENGINES AND KEYWORDS
This is your search engine tracking
report. Every time a visitor comes from a major search engine we
log the keywords they used to find you. These keywords are
displayed in a nice graph for each engine. This will help you
determine what people are entering at the search engines to find
your site.
REFERRING DOMAINS AND URLS
This graph / report will display
the domains that a person was visiting when they decided to go to
your site. This reports also shows static URL's so you can see
exactly who is linking you your web site pages.
Bookmark/Direct = Someone entered
in your URL directly or used a book mark.
Unknown = The user used a Referral
blocking script or our system was unable to determine what URL
they came from.
File = The user (or yourself)
accessed the pages from a saved file or a HTML generating program.
STATS BY LOCATION
This graphic report shows the
country extensions of your visitors. With this report you can see
a graphic representation of the location of your visitors. With
the vast number of country codes you will be a vast number of
visitors from other countries.
HOURLY STATS This report will graph page views
per hour for a specific day. With this graph you can easily see
what hours of the day your site is most visited.
BROWSERS AND PLATFORMS This is an exciting report. A web
designers dream. You can see the different platforms and browsers
that your visitors have installed on their system and used to
access your site. Determine what version of browser they were
using, what screen resolution, if they have JavaScript enabled,
what version of JavaScript and a list of plug-ins installed on
their browsers. Say you wanted to include a Flash( animation. Here
you can see how many of your visitors have the Flash plug-in
installed. Valuable information!
All of these reports used on a
daily basis will help you design, market and promote your site.
While providing detailed reports and graphs of your visitor's
activities.
If you have any questions about
your Goldstats reports please contact us at stats@goldstats.com.
