Vistor's Search Engine |
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Introduction
So you have a web-site - a window of opportunity for your company
at last ! You have spent good money on web-site development, still
more money in promoting it and now know that people do visit your
site as the counter keep on increasing. But exactly how many NEW
visitors are you getting everyday, how many visitors come back later,
what are the prime sources of traffic to your site - search engine
? advertisement ? e-mails ? The bottomline - do you understand your
visitors ?
You may remain oblivious of these facts, but knowing them will definitely
help you understand the situation at ground level and take effective
steps to channelise your money and effort at right direction. The
issues at hand are:
- How to quantify traffic
- Benchmark your performance
- Take corrective measure, if necessary
- Monitor performance daily
The first issue is to identify the standard or widely accepted
performance parameters. The basic parameters are: |
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Hits
A "hit" is a request for a file to the server. Let's
say, for example, that you have a page that has five graphics
on it. This means, this page is made up of 6 files - one plain
text ascii file containing the html code for the page and 5
additional graphics files in .gif, .jpg or any other file format.
If your site has audio or video clippings, that again adds to
number of files.
When a visitor asks for this page, the server receives six requests
or six 'Hits'.
Hit obviously can not be a real indicator of traffic or site
performance as it creates an inflated report of site traffic.
If I could report hits alone, I could create graphics-filled
pages and report numbers into the tens of millions. |
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Page View or Impression
This is a listing of how many times the page (with all associated
files) has been seen by a visitor. A visitor may visit a page three
times in the course of surfing the site and it will be reported
as 3 page views. However, reloads are generally excluded from page
views. Taking our above example, traffic statistics for this visitor
is - 3 page views and 18 hits. |
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Unique or Visitor
Unique, as the name implies, is the number of individual people
coming into the site in a day. A visitor once logs into your site
will be regarded as one unique, no matter how many pages he visits
or how many times he comes back within the same day. For our above
example, the traffic statistics of the visitor is - one unique,
3 page views and 18 hits.
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Performance Parameters for Benchmarking
You can do a variety of analysis using above and a few other parameters.
For example, uniques and page views per month, most visited pages,
path taken by visitors within your site, time spent, repeat visits,
entry page, exit page, depth of page views per visitor etc. These
analyses and benchmarking will reveal if your server is fast enough,
whether your navigation scheme needs a fresh look or contents need
more updates !
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How to collect these statistics ?
If you have your own site (your domain name), your server administrator
will provide a logfile containing basic traffic data. With a special
software you can analyse the logfile and create traffic statistics.
The other option is to go for a third party monitoring. There are
few companies that provide excellent data and statistical analysis
of your web-site traffic in real time. Many of these services are
FREE. I discuss here one such service - Webside Story Inc (We are
user of Webside Story service, popularly known as Hitbox)
Webside Story Inc is a leading US Company that monitors more than
375,000 web-sites all over the world. Any web-site owner can become
its members FREE. On becoming member, you will be given a Java code
for placing at the main page of your site and another code for every
other page you wish to monitor. Every time your site gets a visitor,
Webside Story's Hitbox will capture essential data about the visitor.
You can check the web-site statistics any time by visiting the Hitbox
for your site at Webside's site. Webside Story also ranks each site
on the basis of no. of unique visitors, no. of hits etc. It knows
all the tricks of the trade and filters out spurious hits, reloads
etc. while deciding rank. You can quickly find out top sites in
various categories as also search for a ranked list (e.g. top Indian
sites) To visit Webside Story or apply for Hitbox Counter for your
site, please visit http://www.hitbox.com
The site also contains numerous utility and tools for webmasters.
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