In regards to advertising, site endorsements, as well as other promotion variables, learning more about the visitors that come to a website can be quite rewarding. There are pieces of information that a website owner can study in order to make improvements on the web pages.

A website owner can track the site data by analyzing the number of unique visits, as well as the total amount of page views. Other factors that influence site information include referring URLs, as well as general entry and exit pages. When looking for a way to compile these statistics, a website owner can check the web logs that are created through a web host’s server. An entry into the log is made every time an individual clicks on a website link. This information can also be obtained through other services that provide tracking in statistics when web hosts do not provide these numbers.

Web Logs

Web logs are useful because a website owner can learn a lot about their website visitors. The visitor’s IP address or web host is revealed, as well as the files that they were interested in when looking about. The specific time of visitation can also be obtained. When in need of web analysis, there are a variety of different software for website owners to better understand their website traffic, such as:

www.nettracker.com
www.omniture.com

Additional Tracking Services

If web logs are not readily available or accessible, another web analysis alternative is to use a tracking service outside of the web host. Sometimes this can be obtained for free when a website owner agrees to display an endorsement or button for the company that is providing the statistics. This advertisement will be placed on each page that a website owner wishes to track. A downfall of using this option is that the statistics are sometimes incomplete. If a website visitor halts the loading of a specific page or exits before it has fully loaded, then the service is unable to track this activity. When looking for free statistic services, try:

www.onestat.com
www.statcounter.com
www.shinystat.com


Whether a tracking program, web log analyzer or additional service is chosen, certain vocabulary words will be encountered. Below are a few common terms:

Unique Visit: Refers to a single computer connection to a website. No matter how many web pages are viewed, the individual visitor’s computer will register as one unique visit.

Pageview: This is the total number of pages that were viewed on a specific website. This can be used to adjust the navigation of a website.

Hit: Refers to the request for a file on a website. This data can only be located on the web logs.

Referrer: Shows how a visitor arrived at a website, which helps a website owner figure out which promotion methods are the most effective.

Additional Data: Tracking information, including operating systems, screen resolution, as well as the version of browser, can be obtained. This is identified by the terms: browser, resolution and OS.

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