Sunday 7 March 2010

Website Traffic Analysis Hits Versus Unique Visitors

Website traffic analysis is crucial if your website is your source of income. And a lot of us do have tracking of one sort or the other on our sites

I was on one of the affiliate marketing forums a few days ago and someone kept talking about how many hits he was getting on his site and why this was not converting to clicks....something along those lines

And reading through the thread and other similar forum threads, it occurred to me that a lot of the people responding could not distinguish between website hits and unique visitors.

You could get one unique visitor on your web page and record 15 or more hits for that visitor

A 'hit' refers to how many individual small packages of information on your website are loaded.

So if you have a web page with 8 different images, an RSS feed and a PDF, each of these are individual elements on your page and constitute individual 'hits'. One page load, 9 page elements, 9 hits, one visitor.

For the serious marketer, what you are looking for is the number of unique visitors you are getting on your website. Its the visitor that clicks the adsense ad or follows your affiliate link, or signs up to your email list. It's the visitor that you want to know how they found your site and which keywords appeal to them and where they go once they are on your site. It really is important to make the distinction between hits and unique visitors when doing your traffic analysis

1 comment:

website traffic analysis said...

Yeah Website Analytics are a very important tool in understanding your demographics and what drives yourbusiness online. The secret to increasing sales is to know your customers, where they came from, what their searching trends and purchasing cycle are.I have used Gostats.com Hit counters on many of my sites and blogs and it offers comprehensive and real time tracking. With GoStats’ free Traffic Analysis software, you can find out where your visitors are coming from, what pages they’re reading the most, and exactly where they’re when they leave your website. You can identify their shopping and purchasing patterns, and pinpoint where you’re losing them. Knowing what they dislike is just as important as knowing what they like.