photo credit: despair.com

That shirt just cracks me up every time I see it. BUT, it has some truth to it. These days everyone including your mom and Martha Stewart’s dogs [I subscribe--- don't judge] can have a blog. However, just because you’ve got a website out there doesn’t mean people know it’s there. Assuming you know this already, and you’ve been trying to get some people to visit your site, how do you know how many people see it?

Erin’s last post got me thinking a bit about blog readers versus blog page views. So, this is the first in a series of blog posts on web statistics, blog subscribers, and how to track it all so it makes sense. First, I’d like to walk you through a few basic terms that I might use over the next few weeks.

What is a page view? So then, what’s a hit? A visitor?
OK, let me break this down:

• A page view is exactly what it is named: one view of one page of your website.
• A hit is a request for a file from a Web server, including all image files, stylesheets, javascript, and such. Therefore, every web page may have any number of hits depending on what files are called.
• A visitor is a person, or browser of a person, who accepts a cookie or is tracked with a single IP address.

What does unique actually mean?
Unique visitors are those from different people or search engine robots, but tracked through a cookie or IP address. A unique visitor might view 200 pages in one or multiple sessions. Additionally, these really can’t be tied to individual people in the same sense as you might think. For example, let’s say you view a blog at work then go home and view it again on your home computer. According to the statistics counter those visits are from two different IP addresses, thus translating to two unique visits.

What’s an IP address?
An IP (Internet Protocol) address is a unique numerical identifier of computers and/or networks connected to the Internet. Want to know yours? Go look it up. There is a lot of detailed information about IP addresses that will bore the socks off of you, so I won’t get into that. All we need to focus on here is that IP addresses are used like an identifier to track your visitors.

What is a returning visitor?
This is a unique visitor that has been to your site before, located through the use of a tracking cookie or IP address. These will be you at work, you at home, your Aunt Sally, your blog readers, and other people who come back to your site on a consistent basis, or at least more than once in a specified time period. For many web statistic trackers, this period is 24 hours.

What’s a referring site?
A referring site is another website that has linked to your site so that information is trackable. For instance, if Cute Overload sees that you’ve got dancing hamsters on your site, they might put your URL in their post with a video of your dancing hamsters. And, let’s say you were to click on the Cute Overload link above, they would be able to see in their statistics that you [you, being identified by your statistics] came to their website from the link you clicked on BAKERY’s blog.

Of the above, what should I concern myself with?
I’m glad you asked! Pay most attention to your unique & returning visitors as well as your referring sites. You definitely want to ensure that your unique and returning visitor numbers are increasing over time. Knowing where your readers come from is also important so that you can thank the person who linked to you, and keep tabs on what site(s) bring you the most traffic.

Blog-specific questions

If you have a blog or a blog on your website, there are specific and important statistics just for bloggers:

What’s a subscriber?
A subscriber is someone who subscribes to your blog’s feed.

Is a reader the same as a subscriber?
Nope. A reader is someone who reads your blog on a regular basis. All subscribers are readers [hopefully!], but not all readers are subscribers.

Is a reader the same as a returning visitor?
Sometimes. It depends on whether the reader is viewing your site through a feed reader or other mechanism other than viewing content directly on your website.

I think that’s probably a good foundation for what we’re discussing next week. Then, we’ll examine the best ways to identify and keep track of all these people. That being said, any questions? I’m all ears!