Are you confused when you look at your traffic statistics? What does it mean that you’ve had 80 visitors and 540 hits? Understanding your website traffic can be very confusing if you don’t know what all the technical terms mean. Once you understand the basics, your stats will be far easier to read and provide lots of useful information on improving your website.

Firstly, you will need to have a good stat counter installed on your website. Some web hosts come with a counter already installed, but if you are not happy with the information it provides, you will want to find a new one. Most counters are quite easy to install, using copy and paste HTML. While a host-based counter will provide you with all your stats right there on your site, you will need to visit the website of an outside counter. There, you can set up projects for each website or blog that you own and monitor your stats. We recommend Statcounter and Google Analytics.

Now that you have a good statistic counter, you need to know what all those graphs and numbers mean. The best way to do this is to first understand the terminology used. Then you can start looking at the numbers.

Hits: These are the number of objects that have been loaded onto a browser. This means that if you have 10 objects on your page, plus the HTML file, you will register 11 hits every time someone looks at that page. An object can be anything from a picture or graphic to a widget or css file. Most webpages have several objects, some have hundreds! So, hits are not an indication of how many people actually visited your site.

Visitors: A visitor is someone who looks at your site and receives a cookie to mark them. That way you will know if they are a return visitor (someone coming back to take a second look) or a unique visitor. Computers that don’t allow cookies will register as a unique visitor each time the person returns to your page. Most counters check for both cookies and IP addresses to be extra sure if the visitor is returning or new.

Visits: These are how many times people have arrived at your site. They may be visits from returning visitors or unique ones. For this reason, the visits number can be much higher than your visitors, especially if you have a blog that is frequently updated.

Page Views: Page views differ from hits in that they only register the page as a whole. So if someone looks at your home page which has 24 objects, it would only appear as one page view, whereas it would register 24 hits every time someone looks at your home page.

Referral Page/Site: This will let you know how people are finding your website. Are they clicking through from a forum that you posted on or a search engine? It is handy to see if your backlinks are working.

Entry Page: Your stat counter may tell you what pages your visitors arrived on. Although we commonly think of the home page as the entry page, it is not always so. Many times, when an interior page is indexed on a search engine, a relevant search will turn up only that page and send visitors directly to an article or catalog page. Knowing where people are coming into your website allows you to adjust the pages accordingly.

Exit Page: This is obviously which page people are leaving your website from. Are they running for the hills when they reach your sales page? Maybe you will need to tweak it. Changing the pages that people usually click away from is a good way to keep your visitors longer.

Bounce Rate: This is the percent of visitors who leave your site immediately without visiting any other pages. Depending on the type of site you have, this could be anywhere from 20-70%. A very high bounce rate indicates a bad landing page or untargeted visitors.

Now that you understand the basics of your web traffic, it will be easier to tweak your website. Knowing when and where visitors are entering and exiting will help you make your site more efficient and useful, and in the long run, earn more money.