Webstats are really useful things and can help you make good decisions about your website, provided that you understand them.

One of the biggest problems is understanding what HITS are. HITS are a fairly useless statistic and mislead the uninformed into thinking that their website is doing better than it is. In essence, a HIT is an item that loads on a page. The more items on a page –graphics, text sections, backgrounds, menu items etc – the more HITS are counted. So if you have 15 items to load on a particular page, 15 HITS will be counted. This does not mean that 15 people looked at your page. HITS should be largely ignored when looking at your websites performance.

A meaningful statistic is VISITS. This counts the actual views of your page. A UNIQUE VISIT is a first time viewer, some webstats will also give you numbers of RECURRING VISITORS, this means people who have returned to your website after visiting it before. So you should look at VISITS to get an idea of how many people are looking at your site.

You should also look at the popularity of your PAGES to see which ones are most looked at. If you have pages that are not frequently visited you may want to ask yourself if the content is relevant or if the page is too difficult to get to.

There are many ways in which properly analysing your webstats can help you. For example, look at what day of the week you receive the most visitors to a particular page. If you frequently update that page you may want to time the updates for your most popular viewing day, or even time of day.

Also look at referring sites, this can tell you where you are getting your visitors from and how many. You may, for example, pay for a listing in a business directory. Looking at how many visitors you received from that site can help you decide if it’s worth the money.

Unlike other forms of advertising, websites with good stats have the ability to give you real information about what you are achieving, or trying to achieve. It’s well worth spending some time with them.