People are naturally statistic junkies.
Some of us are more addicted than others but we all are interested in statistics just the same. You see statistics every day on television, at work and in the newspapers. How many people are injured in drunk driving accidents, what is the percentage of unemployed, how many people visit Washington D.C. each year, who leads the American League in RBI's this year; they are all part of our statistical obsessions.

So, then why shouldn't we be curious about web statistics?
It's natural. Even if you only develop sites for yourself and family, you are probably still interested to see how many people visit your site, when they visit, what browser they use, etc. So, for all you statistical junkies out there, this week we will take a look at some of the most common statistics and how they can help you analyze your website.

There are literally hundreds of software packages out there that you can install to analyze your website visitors. Since there are so many, I'm not going to take the time to discuss the different software packages. Odds are you are on a hosted server of some kind anyway and you already have some sort of statistical software available to you. If you have your own server(s), though, and are looking for some good web software you might want to check out WebTrends or LiveStats.

There are several terms used in web statistical analysis that, at first glance, would make you think they are pretty much the same thing. The total hits, sessions and page views might sound like they are almost the same but in fact they are quite different.

Hits - This refers to the number of requests made to the server. What that means is that each time anything is requested from your server, it counts as a hit. This includes graphics, files, CGI scripts and pretty much any kind of request that you can think of. For example, if you have a page that has 30 different graphics on it, its hit count will total 31 which is 1 for the initial page call and 1 for each of the 30 graphics that are requested within the page. There is a lot of debate as to the usefulness of this particular statistic.

Sessions - This particular type if statistic is often much more telling than the hits statistic. It counts the number of visitors rather than the number of requests to the server. It does this by tracking IP addresses. Each visitor will have their own unique IP address when they visit your site.

Page Views - This is kind of the in between statistic. It counts the number page requests for your web. It doesn't care whether the same person is making multiple requests or whether the page itself is making several requests for graphics. It just counts each time a page is requested.

There are also some other very useful statistics that you may be interested in.
The ones that I look at frequently are the browser statistics. I like to know what percentage of my viewers are looking at the site in Internet Explorer vs. Netscape, how new the browsers are, and what type of operating system they are using.

By knowing what type of browsers are being used I can better determine where to put my energies. For example, if 99% of my web's viewers are Internet Explorer users, I may choose to use some "Internet Explorer only" tags in my HTML. By knowing how new the average user's browser is I can determine whether or not to use some advanced DHTML or JavaScript. By knowing the most common platform, I can gear advertising and links toward those types of users.

Search engine statistics are another useful statistic that you will find on most statistical software packages.
This can be very useful if you are relying on search engines to drive traffic to your site. You should be able to view statistics on not just what search engine sent you a referral but what keyword was used to find you on that search engine. If you are advertising on any search engines, this type of analysis is a must.

Those are the basic elements for most web statistical software. With those basic elements, most packages will allow you to create different reports that will help you paint a very accurate picture of your viewers. Over a period of time you should be able to determine things like your peak traffic day, what page(s) your visitors tend to go to first and even how long they stay at your site.

All of the statistics together will give you a good idea of what is and is not working for you. See if your web host has any statistical analysis software available to you.

Thanks for reading!