This blog entry will introduce web analytics and discuss the difference between page views and hits.

Having a great looking, functional and content rich site is a great starting point, but how do you know how effective your site is?  You can use traditional methods such as trying to get users to fill out a survey but this requires user interaction.  This is a simpler way to collect more data and it will require no action from your site visitors.  The solution is to use web analytics. 

What are web analytics you ask?  Web analytics are the study of the behavior of website visitors.  In other words, it looks at what pages visitors are going to, when they are leaving the site, how they got there and much more.  One thing we need to clear up right away is the difference between hits and page views.  A hit is when a page is loaded and any files it requests from the server.  Say your page has 4 movies and 10 images on it that would count as 15 hits.  This means hits isn’t really a good indication of how your site is actually doing.

A much better indication of traffic is page views.  Page views indicate how many pages were actually viewed and the amount of files on the page do not skew the number to be inflated like hits.  This will give you a better idea of what the traffic to your site is really doing and then you can begin analyzing WHY the traffic is the way it is.
 
This is merely the first step in analytics, in my next blog entry I will talk more about analyzing where your traffic comes from and what it all means.  Also keep your eye on our articles section for an upcoming, in-depth article on web analytics and how the OneNet system can provide you with outstanding analytics information.