"Website statistics question" Topic

The statistics tracking program (FireStats) for my website reports that on the average, I get about 600 page views and 300 visits in a given 24-hour period. Do these include search engine robots' (like Google) visits? How about RSS feed hits?

It seems quite improbable that I get that much human-clicked visits in any given 24 hour period, so I'm assuming that some of them are automated bots.

You could try adding a second tracking program like sitemeter.com & see if the figures match. I get two completly different sets of data from Wordpress.com and sitemeter.com for my blog. Wordpress tends to report page views, (1 user opening 10 pages =10 hits), while sitemeter registers based on users IP address (1 user = 1 hit).

Can you get the raw log data files?

If you get these you can read through them and get a good idea of what is generating the raw data.

Different stats programs compile this data in different ways.

Cookies are the best way of tracking visitors.

IP addresses aren't bad, but can be confused by proxy servers, and NAT (i.e one public address with many users).

Page views mix up users and number of pages viewed by a user.

Hits is pretty meaningless as each html page will register a hit for the page and for every jpg or gif on that page, and other files like style sheets and javascript.

You could get a 10 fold increase in hits just by adding 10 tiny gifs to your page :-)

Thanks guys. I think my hosting co. provides detailed statistics--I'll give those logs a look.

I'm a newbie. I use sitemetet and find it pretty useful.

It logs page views by each visitor and a bunch of other info.

The most useful I found is that for each visitor, it tells you the refering page, i.e. the page the visitor came from.

So if someone visits due to a Google image search, or from TMP etc. I can tell. My visitors are sparse enough so I still find it interesting to browse where they come from.

The referring pages are very interesting, and can be very useful.

One interesting thing I discovered with a site a work recently was that nearly 50% of visits had google as a referrer -- so I wondered what search terms people were using.

But on looking further I discovered that they weren't searching on google, they simply had google as their homepage and were typing in the url (or selecting it from a bookmark).

Yeh. Sitemeter actally tells you the search term used if the visitor found your site via a search. But not if via an image search.

Over 90% of my visitors use Google. Most of the rest use Yahoo and an odd few use some unknown-to-me search engine.

I get a few ? for referring page. You have any idea what that means. Robots?

The ? may be due to people directly typing the url into a blank window.

Or some servers don't pass on the referring page.

Most spiders/robots explicitly id themselves.

It does depend on how the software is compiling the stats -- there will always be anomalies in web stats, so it is best to go after the key messages, and ignore some of the detail.

What about using Google Analytics – very good, free service – which you can supplement with a bought option, if required?

I get my statistics through Yahoo Small Business. It tells me how many hits I got, what kind of system (Windows/Mac) the person is using and what browser (IE/FF/etc.). 73.17% of all my traffic comes from outside advertising other than my own. The rest is my shameless plugs.

Jim
jfchistory.com

Thanks all. I did look up the stats using AWStats provided by my web hosting company, and it did provide a rather comprehensive picture of traffic to my website. For those interested, I've just posted a monthly recap for April here:

weetoysoldiers.com/wp/?p=368

It appears that approx. 300 unique visitors per day is about right, as there were 11,000 unique visitors in April…