The Basics of Web AnalyticsWhen generating and discussing web metrics, there are several units that are commonly referred to. It is important to know the distinction between these so that you know what you are looking at. One of the most common metrics is ‘hits.’ You often hear people saying “we had 10,000 hits this week on our website.” Unfortunately, statements like that are not well defined. This kind of information usually comes from a ‘hit counter’ placed on the home page of the site. In this case, what this person really means is “we had 10,000 hits on our home page last week.” Hit counters serve their purpose, but only provide basic information. Web analytics allows you to go much deeper, without losing this basic information. The following are some basic and common measurements of web analytics. Hits and impressions In most web analytics discussions a ‘hit’ is defined as a single request for any item on your website. This can include images, animations, audio, video, downloads, PDF or Word documents or anything else that you allow visitors to access. When a web browser loads a page, it also loads all the components referenced by that page. This means that it requests all the images (often including ‘roll over’ images for mouse effects) and, perhaps, stylesheets, JavaScript files or other external references. A single page load can result in many ‘hits.’ Quickly, pull up the home page of your site and see if you can figure out how
many ‘hits’ you generated by doing that: count all the graphics that
it loads. If you are familiar with HTML, look at the source and see if there are
external stylesheets, script files, or roll-over images that are loaded invisibly.
You may be surprised at the number of items required just to build your home page. So if a single request to the home page can generate many hits in your logs, what value is a hit count? Mainly it is useful for managing or monitoring the load on your server. Each hit represents a single network request. So a large number of hits corresponds to many processes that your server has to deal with and more traffic over your network connection. It is also a general indication of traffic volume and can, therefore, be used to view growth of your website. It can be indicative of the user experience. If a single visit to your home page generates 75 hits, that means the new visitor has to wait through loading 75 items before she gets the full experience. Most browsers will only load four or five items at a time, so loading the home page will take a while. It might be a good idea to rethink the design of that site to reduce the number of items on the pages so they load faster. (Browsers do actually cache items; the affect of this on your statistics are discussed in detail in Appendix B.) Page views Page hits are a much more useful metric than hits for analyzing user experience. Web sites are organized into pages, and users (and designers) think of them in pages, so counting page hits makes more sense. Now that you have loaded your home page, wander around your site a bit. Keep track of the number of times a new page loads. This is the number of page hits your visit is registering. The more time you spend on the site, exploring, the more page hits you register. So page hits represents the navigational experience of the visitor. There is one situation in which page hits do not correlate directly to the
user experience. If your site uses frames, the frameset page and all the frames
that load to make the ‘visible page’ are each counted as a single
page hit. So if your ‘home page’ actually is a frameset with three
frames, it will register four page hits, not one (what the user is experiencing)
for that initial load. If the visitor then clicks on a link that only changes
one frame, that will register as a single page hit. If you have built your site
so that each click loads a whole new frameset, then you will get multiple page
hits for each click the visitor performs. If you understand the design of your
site, however, you can easily adjust the page hits count to reflect these aspects.
Other types of hits are important too. “Graphics Hits,” are the number of requests for images, animations or other graphics. Graphics are often larger than the content of a page and take up a good portion of bandwidth as well as requiring the visitor to wait while the page loads. If the number of graphics hits for your site is significantly larger than that of page hits, then there are probably a lot of graphics on some or all of your pages. You might consider redesigning the site to make it load faster. Downloads This can be programs, archives, zip files, or PDF documents that users download from your site. If you distribute software or documents from the site, it is helpful to have a quick count of the number of downloads in each period. Errors Errors are simply a count of the number of requests for items that did not
complete – either because they were not there or could not be produced.
It is a quick measurement of your site’s diagnostics. The count of bytes in a period is very useful for tracking the bandwidth usage on your network. If you are billed for bandwidth usage on a monthly basis you can see an estimate of the amount of bandwidth your website. You can also use bytes to assist in improving the design of the site. Individual pages can take a long time to load if the graphics they reference are large. You can look at the ratio of Bytes to Pages in a report and determine the load-average for each page on your site. There are other factors that can affect the byte-to-page-hit value that make
this ratio only useful in some situations. If you have any downloads on your site,
this will likely increase the byte count significantly. On the other hand, caches
can make the byte counts significantly lower than if all graphics were loaded.
When assessing the byte-to-page-hits ration, you may want to consider the environment
as well. For example, if these statistics are for an intranet, where users have
a lot of available bandwidth, you may be perfectly comfortable with a 100KB-per-page
average, where you would not be when your visitors were using 56k dial-up Internet
connections. Nonetheless, the byte count does accurately reflect the amount of
data requested from your server. Unique hosts Unfortunately, most websites do not require login. Because of the way the HTTP protocol was designed, there is no connection between requests by the same user to your server. So without requiring authentication, visitors and their visits have to be estimated. In the past an estimate of unique visitors could be found by looking at the
Unique Hosts. Each request that a visitor makes to the site (whether for a page
or for the graphics and other referenced files from that page) is associated with
a host address (or IP number). When the Internet first started, each computer
connected to it had its own host address, so a count of unique hosts was usually
a good indicator of the number of unique visitors you had in a given period. There is still value to counting unique hosts. A comparative value of unique hosts as a trend over time can be indicative of the reach or breadth of coverage that your website is getting. If you increase the number of unique hosts per month in a six month period, then you probably reaching a broader group of visitors. Visits or sessions In addition to counting the number of unique visitors you have had, you often want to know how many visits you have had. A given user may visit the site three distinct times in the course of a month. This would count as three visits. Summary uses some complicated heuristics to determine all the requests in a given visits. The nature of the web makes it very difficult to know exactly what requests belong to each individual visit. The Visit count can therefore be used as an estimate of the number of visits that occurred in a period. Another common term for visits is ‘sessions.’ This is because a visit is often defined as a series of consecutive requests from a given user bounded by inactivity. So if a user makes 100 requests, then does not make any for 45 minutes, then 75 more, it is assumed those were two separate ‘sessions’ or ‘visits’ to your site. Visit tracking with cookies One of the most common techniques for improving visit metrics and request data in general is to configure your web server to send out a ‘session cookie.’ A cookie is a small bit of information that your site can have visitors store with their browsers. Whenever they request a page, the browser sends the cookie back to your server. Cookies can be given an expiration date if you want them to last for a while. A ‘session cookie’ has no expiration date set so the browser deletes it as soon as the session completes (usually when the user closes the browser). Session cookies are therefore unique to each visit. While a given browser in a given visit may still cache some of the requests, two different visitors accessing your site through a web cache or proxy server will have to make distinct requests. With a properly configured server and properly configured analysis software, you can even use these cookies to help the software figure out what requests comprise each visit. Summary SP will allow you to configure it to track visit cookies in your logs. In order to make this most effective you should configure your web server to log outgoing and incoming cookies so that you can correlate the first request with subsequent requests in a visit. While this is much more accurate than the heuristic approach, especially when dealing with proxy sharing, it does not provide a perfect solution. Some users will adamantly refuse to accept cookies from your sites. Other user agents (like robots or spiders) never accept cookies. Finally, some firewalls and proxies will strip cookies from requests completely. If you require users to accept cookies, you may be blocking a large number of potential visitors. If you do not, then you are back to having some visits without cookie data and the previously mentioned issues all return. Please feel free to read on about different web analytics software vendors:
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