Statistics - What does all this mean?
The statistics page is not as complicated as it first appears. The overwhelming volume of data is actually the same data viewed in graphical and table form, broken down into Daily and Monthly totals. By clicking on the blue hyperlinked Month in the 'Summary Table' at the bottom of the main page (e.g. 'Sept 2000' in blue underlined text), it will load a more detailed report for each month, even including which country people are viewing your site from, and what browser they use.
Summary of Terms
Hits
Relatively useless information and virtually obsolette in terms of web statistics. 'Hits' refers to the number of http requests to a web server. For example when a user requests a web page to view, the browser might send many requests to the server (where it is hosted) to download the page and its contents, therefore each request is a 'hit'.
Files
This refers to the number of 'files' download from a web site, for example if a page is downloaded and it has three images and one pdf file contained within it, this is counted as five 'files'.
Pages
Usually defined by how many times a html file or web 'page' is loaded.
Visits
This is an extremely important figure as it represents the amount of times visitors actually enter your web site. If they view ten pages in your site, this is still classified as one 'visit'. Although if the visitor returns to the site the next day, this will be two 'visits'.
Sites
Another important figure as this tells you how many unique visitors have visited your site. If the same person (using the same IP) visits your site 5 times, this is one 'site'.
KBytes
This refers to the size of files downloaded from the server to browsers
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