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Web Site Statistics
Gathering Statistics about Visitors to Your Site
Statistics about visitors to a website are often gathered by a program running on the host server. For example, if you host at Verio, you can elect to have site statistics generated by one of several programs. Below is a description of those gatherered by Urchin. There's a tutorial on Urchin at http://www.verio.com/support/files/flash/urchin_tutorial.swf. To see the statistics for a site hosted at Verio, enter the site name followed by stats/statistics. This information is password protected and thus typically would only be available to the site owner/webmaster. If your hosting provider does not provide access to such a program, you typically can get some of the statistics below by putting a link to a third party on your site (a counter).
General comments about Urchin:
- One can vary the date range used for the report (daily, weekly, monthly) -- When would each of these be preferred?
- Anytime there is an arrow, one can click on the arrow for additional breakout of the data
- The data is generated in real time and can be exported for analysis by programs such as Excel
| Item | Explanation |
| Traffic | Visits to your site as a whole |
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| Top Pages | Visits to individual pages in your site |
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| Top Referrals | Domain the user was coming from when they went to your site. This allows you to evaluate the relative effectiveness for your site of particular search engines, link exchanges with other sites, and ads on other sites. |
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| Top keywords | The keywords people entered into a search engine and then clicked on the search engine link to get to your site. |
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| Referral tree | Like Top Referrals, where people were coming from when they came to your site. |
| Search engines | The search engines that people were using to get to your site -- by clicking on the arrow, one can see the search terms people were entering at each search engine where they ultimately clicked through to the site. |
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| Top domains | Percentages using different ISP's (e.g. AOL) to access the site |
| Browsers | The browsers used to visit your site -- by clicking on the arrow, one can see information on the browser versions. Note that AOL is grouped with IE. |
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| Platform tree | Windows, Macs. etc. |
| Tracking - Top Entrances | What are the reasons why users don't start with the home page? What are the implications of people starting at other pages? |
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| Tracking - Top Exits | This is the page last visited when they leave your site |
| Tracking- Click Through | The pages in your site to which users go from a particular page in your site - click on a particular page to see the tree from that point |
  The
data on the left suggests that people are leaving the site after visiting
the home page (with the style sheet) and seeing the popup ad. This is not
surprising, since the popup ad says the site is essentially out of business
except for sales in May 2004 at a festival. Compare this with the data
below for November when the site was still in business. |
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| Tracking - Depth of Visit | Number of pages visited at site |
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| Tracking - Length of Visit | What do the short visits represent? |
| Usernames | Top usernames used if any authentication process required by site (useful to detect hacking activity) |
Revised April 12, 2006 Comments to William Pegram, bill@billpegram.com