INTRODUCTIONA website is a fantastic way of publishing information to the world.With all the effort used to create a site, you would of course want tohave some information about your audience. From what countries dothey hail? What information did they seek? What content held theirattention?
Web analytics is the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of Internet data for purposes of understanding and optimizing web usage
.In most cases web analytics involves measuring a visitors browsinghabits on your website but it can also be used to monitor web sitesother than your own. Tracking the competition, monitoringadvertisement campaigns or just keeping up with the buzz on a website are all reasons to use off-site analytic tools.Most of this paper will be about on-site analytics. This refers tomonitoring data about your own web site. The next few sections willexplain this further.WEBSITE STATISTICS There are various important statistics that you need to track on yourwebsite. The basic terminologies are described below.
Hits
This is the retrieval of any particular item from a web server. This couldinclude all types of files such as jpegs, PDF files, HTML files, JavaScripts, flash videos. It is not a true indicator of traffic to that web site.For example, a page is downloaded and it contains four JPEGS, two JAVASCRIPT files, one MP3, one M4V and one flash file. The totalnumber of hits would be ten. Nine site objects and the page itself.Monitoring hits is more of an indicator of the number of filesdownloaded by a user or how much bandwidth was used. The morefiles a user has to download, the longer it takes for the page to appear.
Page Views
To get a better perspective of your website statistics you should trackthe page views. Page views are the number of times a page isdownloaded. A single page view is counted as the request to load asingle page of a web site. Only the page is counted rather than thecontents of the page. A lot of advertisers use page views to determine
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