Web Site Statistics Terminology

We've assembled a brief list of words and definitions to help you when evaluating your Website traffic statistics.

Hits: Hits are the number of file requests made on the server. They mean very little to someone evaluating real traffic. This is a number you most likely want to skip right over.

Unique Visitor: This is an actual individual spending time in your site. The number of unique visitors provides you some very valuable information regarding site traffic.

Visitor Session: A visitor session is the actual time a user spends in your site. For instance if you visit google.com and read the news for 5 minutes, you have just added one "visitor session" to their statistics.

Returning Visitor: This is a unique visitor *see above that has spent time in your site 2 or more times. A high number of returning visitors is a good sign that your website is "sticky".

Search Engine Referrals: This is the number of times users performed searches in the search engines, found your site in the results and clicked through. Tracking this on a regular basis provides you with some good insight as to whether or not the ranking you have in the search engines is working for you. To take this tracking to the next level, it is also important to track your conversion rate *see below. If your referral rate is high, but your conversion rate is very low, this is a good indicator that while you may have good ranking, you may not have it for the right key words.

Keyword Research: What are people searching for and how do you find out? That's exactly what keyword research does.  It is the process of investigating your log file, other websits, the PPC market and a few other spots to determine which words and phrases will actually drive the right traffic to your site. Without this step, search engine optimization can be a wasted effort.

Conversion Rate: The conversion rate is the number of people that come to your site and do more than just take your free information. In other words, they "do" something. Depending on your site and its purpose, that could be filling out an RFQ, it could be making a purchase or simply sending an email.

Referring Site: Any site that provides your site with visitors is a "referring site". Many trade associations and organizations provide links to their members. These may be among your top referring sites. Obviously any directory listings or banner advertisements you place would fall into this category as well. In fact it is fairly simple to track each user from a given banner ad to get an exact measurement of your ROI.

Homepage Exit Rate: The number of users viewing the homepage and leaving

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