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When looking at your tracker reports or evaluating an online resource, it can be easy to be confused by the technical jargon of trackers and website statistic software. Let’s take a look at what some of these terms mean and how you can use them effectively when evaluating online sources.

Session
A ‘Session’ is defined as a series of clicks on your website by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. A Session is initiated when the visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when the browser is closed or there is a period of inactivity. If the time period is set at 30 minutes, and the user leaves the site and comes back within that 30 minutes that would be considered the same session. If the user were to leave and then come back to the site after that 30 minute time limit has expired, that would be considered a different session. By this definition, a single visitor can have multiple sessions throughout a day.

Hits
This is the retrieval of any data from a web page. If you were to call up a web page with 10 graphics on it, this would actually register as 11 hits. This counts as 11 because one hit is counted for the actual page and 10 hits for each graphic that appears on the page. Because of this, Hits are considered a questionable measurement of how popular the website actually is. There are a lot of companies out there that will “Guarantee” 10,000 hits to a website a month. These types of advertisements do not mean much of anything.

Page View
A page view is when a human accesses your page through a web browser. Page views are a better way to evaluate traffic rather than a hit because when viewing the statistic, you know that it resulted from a person looking at the page and not a graphic loading on the page.

In the graph above you can see how different the stats can be for sessions, page views and hits. This data is over a 13 month period.

Visitor
When a person views a website and their browser accepts a cookie, they can be tracked as a visitor. Trackers track cookies through JavaScript to pass along certain information about the page and the visitor. By this definition a visitor is a human being and their actions are ‘human’ events, because only humans use JavaScript to navigate the internet as opposed to a spider. If a cookie is not accepted by the browser, then trackers use IP addresses to track visitors.

Unique Visitor
Each visitor to your website has a unique IP address. Trackers can see this IP address and will count it only once even though that person may have visited your website multiple times. Some of the statistics from this can be deceiving because some Internet Service Providers (ISP’s) use Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol such as AOL and cable modem providers. These use different IP addresses for every file requested and can make one user look like many different users.

Most Requested Pages
With a Tracker purchased from Blizzard Internet, we can see what pages people are looking at on a daily, monthly and yearly basis. Most of the time your most requested page will be the home page because this is like the “doorway” to the rest of your website. From there people will move “inside” to view other pages. We can then see what percentages of people get from the homepage to other pages on your site. We can then determine if a certain page is appealing to a visitor and make adjustments if needed.

Bounce Rate
To clearly define Bounce Rate, let me first explain three important factors in determining this statistic:
Entrances - This is where Visitors entered your website (not always the homepage)
Bounce - This is the number of times visitors have left a particular page and not visited any other page on your website
Exit Page - The last page a viewer looked at before they left the site

The Bounce Rate is the percentage of entrances on the page that resulted in exits without viewing any other page on the site. It is calculated as Bounces divided by Entrances. With this statistic, you can determine what pages are driving people away from your site. Typically the home page bounce rate is less than interior pages. If your home page has a very high bounce rate, this is an indication that there is something that is driving a viewer away from the site. Things that can contribute to a high bounce rate can include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Something not aesthetically pleasing about that page
• Viewer is not finding the information they desire
• Slow load time of the page

These factors as well as many others indicate that it is time to reevaluate your home page, and it may be time for a redesign.

Referrals
This statistic shows how people are getting to your website. This is a helpful tool to see what online resources, such as directories and search engines, are sending you traffic. Many times when you look at this statistic, you will notice the first referrer on the top of your list says “No Referral.” This means that the user has either bookmarked your website or typed the URL directly into their browser. This statistic is helpful for when you are trying to determine which online directories you should renew from year to year. Looking at this statistic over a 13 month period to compare month to month is how we assess referral traffic here at Blizzard.

Michael Buczek - Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

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