Site Statistica

[Guest]

i have checked the archives for a simple answer, and have some of the problem
solved, but would like help on the following:
Site hits. What is meant by every item loaded? Every photo, link, button,
etc? What is an accurate stat for individual site visitors? Any other tips
for interpreting all the webaliser statistics? As always, thanks heaps,
graeme.

 

[Murray]

There is a huge difference between HITS and SESSIONS. A hit is a fetch
operation, so a hit would be generated for every image, and every externally
linked file fetched from the server.

If your page had 13 of those and I browsed to your site, I would trigger 14
hits (13 for the linked files and one for the page). Browsing to the next
page with identical linked files, I would trigger only 1 hit (the page
itself, since everything else is in the local cache).

A session, on the other hand, is created when I first come to your site, and
closed when I leave it (or time out). So - no matter how many pages I
browse, or how many externally linked files they contain, I only get counted
as a single session.

Most hit counters are of the former ilk, i.e., useless. Most hosts provide
server logs which you can analyze (many do this for you) to determine
sessions - a much more meaningful number.