Beyond the technical jargon of site stats.

So you’re at one of those after-hours gatherings with some business associates and you end up at the table with your boss and a friend of his who is “in the biz.” The friend has just told the story of how his company just launched a web site last week and they have already had over 10,000 hits. Your boss turns to you, and in that competitive elementary-school, well-my-dad-can-beat-up-your-dad tone asks how many hits your site has had this week.

You’re in luck. You just checked your site stats earlier in the day. You think back, trying to sort out all those numbers in your head. Lets see…how many people came to your site? Oh yes, you remember, there where 562 visitors as of 2:15 today. Great. You now have the opportunity to impress your boss with your keen abilities to remember data. Wait a second. What did that other guy say? Over 10,000? Ouch!

The are an infinite number of reasons why site stat numbers could be way off, but one of the most common is simply the result of confusing terms.

Ten thousand hits! A million hits! Great, but what exactly is a hit? And how is it different from a visit or a page view?

Hits are probably the single most misleading term when talking about site stats. A hit is simply a request to the server for a file—-any file. Your typical web page can will register several hits. One for the page itself, one for each external CSS or Javascript file (many sites have at least one of each), and one for every graphic on the page, including invisible spacer GIFs.

Imagine that you were tracking statistics for a mall. A hit would be like counting every item (including people) that enters the mall. If I walk into the mall you would count me, my shirt, pants, shoes, socks, watch, wallets, keys and whatever else is on me. As I walk through the entrance, the mall may get a dozen or more hits easily.

In the early days of the web, some unscrupulous site would purposely have many tiny images on single pages to increase their “hit count.” If their site had more hits than a competitors they could charge more for advertising. So as not to incriminate anyone, many people use “hits” and “page views” interchangeably without meaning to deceive anyone. But they are different and most site stats recognize this. Hits may be somewhat useful in monitoring server loads and activity, but for determining the site’s popularity and for marketing purposes, hits are useless. Ignore them.

Visits are simply visits (or sessions if you want the technical term). If someone (or something in the case of various search engine robots) goes to your site and leaves without clicking on anything or they click through and read every page, it counts as one visit. If someone walks into the mall it is one visit until the person leaves. By the way you would also count the delivery guys, mall employees and security, too. They would be like the “robots” that crawl your site. They are not going there to shop, but they still get counted. They would have to leave and come back for it to count as two visits. On the web, a visit is usually ended when the user closes the browser. Under some circumstances, visits, or sessions, will expire after a set period of time–usually for security reasons. Visits are a good way of gauging how many people go to your site.

Page views are the total number of pages viewed. This would be like our mall shoppers not just entering the mall, but walking into the individual stores and browsing. Just as one may visit several stores at the mall, one visit may generate multiple page views. In fact, ideally it should. If the number of visits equals the number of page views it could mean people are going to your site and it is not what they were looking for. For example, if I am looking for a classic ’69 Mustang and site comes up about horses I am not likely to click on the links and therefore generate multiple page views since it wasn’t what I was looking for. Page view information becomes even more valuable when it is coupled with individual pages. This will help determine what sections of the site your visitors are going to.

Good site stats provide a lot of data. Great site stats simplify that data into useful information.

The new web site for the Singles Ministry at The Church By The Glades in Coral Springs, Florida went live today. This dynamic site is built with a custom content management system that allows the staff to easily update the content of the site.

You can check out the site at cbgsingles.com.