12 06 07 - 19:37
What can I learn?
By John Potter
Here’s my bottom line….you can’t learn much.
Sure, if you’re only getting three visits a month, then you have a problem, but if you have 5000 visits a day and none of those visitors enquires about your products or services then that’s not really any better.
Most people don’t understand the difference between hits, visits and page views. These are also open to interpretation by your service provider, the software manufacturer of your statistics software or a number of other factors, but generally a hit is a file download. An average web page consists of the html file, and a file for each graphic and sometimes more, so when someone comes to your homepage it will register as multiple hits. Visits are usually a session, or one unique person’s time on your website. This is more informative than hits, but still you cannot tell if these visitors are truly unique visitors or the same person coming to your site, leaving and coming back. Page views are the number of times someone looks at a page, but this can be thrown off as well.
Even if the pre-stated situations aren’t confounding enough search engines visit your page frequently to check if you’ve changed anything. These automated search engine “robots” or “spiders” register as visits, hits and page views. If you have a blog like I do spammers attack your site constantly. I use software that easily fends them off and keeps them from doing harm, but their onslaught still gets recorded in my traffic log.
I recently added a screensaver for download. Its part fun, part brand reinforcement, but I must admit that since the file is an exe file I can be sure that all hits on that file are the real thing. The only thing is I get lots of downloads on that file and a lot of people who are downloading it are doing so from other sites and/or aren’t terribly interested in my site. Like I said, I did it partly for fun, so I knew those hits weren’t going to be a good barometer of the health of escapekeygraphics.com anyhow and that’s okay.
My bottom line is…don’t give yourself an ulcer over web traffic. Better yet don’t give yourself an ulcer at all.
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