Get out of the habit of referring to "hits."
One of the terms frequently thrown around regarding website traffic is "hits." What most people mean by "hits" is the number of visits the site gets. But technically, the word "hits" actually refers to the total number of files that are requested from the server. Therefore the number of hits to a site is always going to be significantly higher than the actual number of visits to the site. This is because a typical visit to a website will include "hits" on a number of pages. Not only is each page counted as a hit, but all the graphics on every page requested also register as uniquely requested files, a.k.a. "hits." Given the number of graphics on a typical webpage (including the navigation bar, highlight states of graphic menus and so forth), the difference between hits and visits is substantial. It would not be uncommon for a traffic report to show ten or even twenty times as many hits as actual visits.
Look at sessions, page views and average length of visit.
When analyzing your traffic report you can, for the most part, ignore hits and bytes (bytes being the total amount of data sent out from your site). Instead, it's much more helpful to review the trends in sessions, pageviews, and length of stay. Urchin provides both totals and averages for these traffic stats.
Tracking your overall website sessions is the best and most accurate way to determine your site's performance. A session is a unique visit by a singe individual. One session is recorded for each unique site visit whether the visitor looks at one page or every page on the site.
Because every site is different, comparing your site's performance to another's is not very useful. Some sites are designed to attract daily readers. Some are simply used to support other marketing materials. Therefore, comparing overall traffic volume is not a useful effort. Rather than worrying about how many sessions your site receives compared to other sites, it's better to understand how your site adjustments and marketing efforts impact your site's overall traffic patterns. Therefore, tracking session data from month to month is the most fundamental aspect of analyzing your website traffic reports. Hopefully, you will see growth in your overall session traffic over time.
I don't know if you are interested, but I was able to generate approximately 1200 visitors in a given month. I wrote a small article about the steps I took to do it. I did it all for free. Anyway here is my link. http://www.backyardengineer.com/web_traffic.html
I hope that is usefull.
Kevin
p.s. please feel free to check out the other pages on my site. I have put some time into it. Thanks
traffic
how come referrals are calculated by "sessions"? if a session is a unique visitor to our site, how come the referral sessions are higher, than my unique visitors?
We are developing our website, we have just started it. We don't know where these visitors are coming from, almost 300 hundred every month and increasing.Is this normal?, we have not started advertising our website yet.
Who can help me to find what is the average conversion rate download/buy? I am receptive to any suggestions!
10xs
Great article.
They say that conversion rates are about 200/1. i.e if you get 600 hits per day then you should get 3 sales/downloads.
An interesting article, but....4:53 - That's a really long time - especially as an average.13.5 Page views as an average really is extreamily high, I don't think I have ever clicked on that many links on any website I have ever visited (except maybe MySpace / Facebook).I'm not suggesting that these figures of yours are pure fantasy but they're so mind bogglingly high I find it a bit hard to accept. I would say my average number of clicks on a site is between 0-3, which either makes me an extreamily unique surfer or the sites you're developing are of such complexity, depth and involvement that I must be missing something.Facebook - Now that site I could easily believe has an average of 10-50 clicks per visit, but anything other than a social networking, dating or otherwise members-only site just couldn't require that number of clicks.If any site does require 13 clicks (on average) - especially if it's an information site it's a very bad thing. Any site that requires 13 clicks if it's an e-commerse site is also extreamily bad.'More' is not always better and in some cases 'more' is an extreamily bad thing.Number of visitors - not 'hits' is what counts. 'Hits' are simply the number of files being served by your server, this means html pages, jpg's, gif's, png's banners you name it anything your server sends is a 'hit' and the more it has to send for each visitor the worse it is. Everytime Googlebot visits it's a hit - etc...I publish a site with 1,500 visitors pcm without any advertising other than organic search engines, but the average page views are closer to 2 and the length of stay is normally about 2 mins.I only mention this because novice publishers/developers are often lead to believe that being #1 in Google for a search phrase means they'll be making millions - this is not so. I hate to burst the bubble, but so many people are being mislead that I needed to say something on this.Maybe I should build a members only site...?All the best.
I get on average 10,000 hits a month. Is this a good amount of hits?
http://www.kellydaughertyphotography.com