Website statistics: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 16:17, 3 June 2008

Our pro users have the option of enabling detailed statistics for each website. This can help you see where your visitors are coming from, what pages they're visiting, and how often they come back. These statistics are much more detailed then the ones provided through our Hit Counter web tool and can help you target, optimize and market your website.

Enabling Website Statistics

First, you need to have a professional hosting account to enable website statistics. If you have a free account, you can either upgrade your hosting service or try out our Hit Counter web tool.
Log in to your Bravenet account.
Click the websites tab.
Select the website you wish to enable statistics on from the Manage Websites list, and click on its name or the icon next to its name.
Select the Enable Statistics option.
It will take about 24 hours after enabling statistics for information to start being collected.

Viewing Website Statistics

Once you have enabled statistics, you can view them at any time:

Log in to your Bravenet account.
Click the websites tab.
Select the website whos statistics you wish to view from the Manage Websites list, and click on its name or the icon next to its name.
Select the View Statistics option.
The statistics page will open in a new window or tab of your browser. If it does not open, verify that you are allowing popups from Bravenet.com.

Statistics are broken down by month. By default, the current month is shown, but you can select other months/years from the drop downs at the top of the screen. Select the OK button to finalize your date selection.
Note that the although website statistics are collected constantly, they are only updated on this page several times per day.

A Note About Accuracy

The nature of statistics is that they provide an overall view of the operation of your website. They are not 100% accurate, and there are several situations that can affect your statistics. In general, as long as you have at least moderate traffic, the patterns revealed by the collected statistics are accurate, even if the exact numbers are not.

Specifically, the number unique visitors can be a challenge to measure correctly. Dynamic IP addresses, firewalls and proxy services all can make a unique visitor appear to be a repeat visitor, or vice versa.

In addition, GeoIP tracking is a rough estimate at best - some blocks of IP addresses are bought in one country, but allocated in another, and more people than ever are using proxy and tunneling services that can mask their true location.

Also, when measuring bandwidth with respect to your monthly bandwidth limit, the numbers in these statistics is not used. Since these bandwidth statistics do not account for FTP traffic and other related bandwidth usage, they will differ from the usage information in the websites tab of your account.

Terminology

A specific set of terms are used when discussing web site statistics:

Unique Visitor:

Individual visitors that viewed at least one page of your website. This is tracked by unique IP address, meaning that it's not exact. It's possible for someone to have a different IP address on a different day, and they would be tracked as multiple visitors. Also, sometimes multiple visitors from behind one firewall will appear as one visitor.

Number of Visits:

The number of incoming visitors that have not viewed your page within the last 60 minutes. This means that one person visiting 10 pages on your site, all within 60 minutes of each other, would count as one visit, whereas one person visiting your site in the morning, and then again in the evening, would count as two visits.

Page Views:

The total number of web pages that are viewed by every visitor to your site.

Hits:

The total number of web pages, images, or other files viewed by every visitor. Keep in mind that viewing one page can involve multiple hits.

Bandwidth:

The amount of data downloaded from your site by visitors. This includes a total of all the web pages, images, and other media that is viewed. This number may differ from the numbers reported in the bandwith usage section of your account summary, because this number does not include FTP transfers.

GeoIP:

Using a table of which IP addresses map to which cities and countries, we can provide information about the geographical location of your visitors. This information is not exact, as IP allocation is pretty flexible sometimes.

Robot/Spider:

Search engines and other website categorizers use programs called spiders or robots to analyze websites. These robots or spiders are supposed to identify themselves as such, and are tracked separately. Their data is summarized in its own chart, and is not included in the other charts.

Duration of Visit:

This is a rough calculation of the time that someone visited your site for. A visit will start when a new visitor (who has not viewed any page from your website within the last 60 minutes) views any page on your site. The visit ends once 60 minutes have passed with no page views from that visitor. 60 minutes is then deducted from the total, and the result is the visit duration.

HTTP Status Codes:

If visitors are getting error messages when viewing your site, those errors will be tallied up in the status codes section. These hits are not counted on most of the tables.

Referrer:

A referrer is a page that is linking to yours. When someone clicks any link, the source of that link is passed along to the destination as the referring address. These statistics can help you identify who found your site on a search engine, and what websites are linking to yours.

Disabling Website Statistics

Note that disabling your website statistics will delete your stored statistics history! We can not recover this information once you have deleted it!

If you wish to disable website statistics for a website:

Log in to your Bravenet account.
Click the websites tab.
Select the website you wish to disable statistics on from the Manage Websites list, and click on its name or the icon next to its name.
Select the Disable Statistics option.
Note that all statistics for this site will be deleted. Select OK from the warning box if that's OK with you.

@@ Line 25: / Line 25: @@
 ===A Note About Accuracy===
-The nature of statistics is that they provide an overall view of the operation of your website.  They are not 100% accurate, and there are several situations that can affect your statistics.  In general, as long as you have moderate traffic, the patterns revealed by the collected statistics are accurate, even if the exact numbers are not.
+The nature of statistics is that they provide an overall view of the operation of your website.  They are not 100% accurate, and there are several situations that can affect your statistics.  In general, as long as you have at least moderate traffic, the patterns revealed by the collected statistics are accurate, even if the exact numbers are not.
 Specifically, the number unique visitors can be a challenge to measure correctly.  Dynamic IP addresses, firewalls and proxy services all can make a unique visitor appear to be a repeat visitor, or vice versa.