Introduction to website log file statistics
Most website hosts provide some sort of web analytics. If you don’t know where to find your web stats ask your provider. If your provider does not provide them there are several places that offer cheap or free log file statistics. The general stats you will see are hits, visitors, unique visitors, and page views. Don’t worry about how many hits you have that is a worthless statistic. Unique Visitors is a guess on how many unique people came to your site. The “visitors” stat is just a raw number of unique computer addresses (IP addresses) that came to your site. The two are different because one visitor might come in on several computer addresses. AOL is the worst they come in on a different address every time they hit a new page. Page Views is how many pages were viewed. All of these stats should be taken with a grain of salt. There are lots of ways they can be interpreted. With the general stats you are looking for trends. There is a lot of information in your log files. I will cover more statistics to look at and how to read them in future tips.
