The HostBaby Blog

Mark Twain’s quote that “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” comes to mind as I compose this article.  Statistics is an elastic science and when approaching the stats for your website it’s hard to know how to interpret all the numbers and then use those numbers to inform your marketing efforts.

Let’s avoid an in-depth analysis of web stats and leave that to Wikipedia. What I do want to explain are some of the basics and clear up common confusion regarding the concept of a website ‘hit’.

From Wikipedia’s entry on Internet Hits:

“The number of hits received by a website is frequently cited to assert its popularity, but this number is extremely misleading and dramatically over-estimates popularity. A single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) of discrete files, each of which is counted as a hit as the page is downloaded, so the number of hits is really an arbitrary number more reflective of the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website’s actual popularity. ”

In other words, your gross hits doesn’t tell you a whole lot.    One person visiting your site could potentially generate hundreds of hits in one visit.

Now you may ask, “How do I know how many people are visiting my website?” Whether you choose to use your HostBaby stats viewer or use Google Analytics or another similar service, you will notice that there are many different terms and data sets to review.  Visits is the best indicator of the number people loading your website.  Unfortunately, there is no way for a statistics program to tell the difference between a person, a computer, and a search bot–so even this statistic must be taken with a grain of salt.

According to Wikipedia: “A visit is defined as a series of page requests from the same uniquely identified client with a time of no more than 30 minutes between each page request.”

In other words, a visit is one person or computer accessing your site within a half-hour period.  If that same computer or person accesses the site after a half hour has elapsed it will create a new visit.  So if you go to your own site a few times a day–you will be generating multiple hits.  In some analytic programs you can view the unique visitors per day number, which would cut out the repeat visitors.

There other useful statistics to review as well such as:

Top Referrers: The web addresses from which visitors navigated to your site

Top Urls:  The most clicked on your website

Countries/location: The geographic location of your website visitors

Depending on your affinity for numbers and stats you can dig in quite a bit deeper, but for most artists the main interest is in being able to notice when there is a jump or drop in visits. This helps you judge the effectiveness of your marketing (e.g. online newsletter, blog, promotions, etc.).

Of course, monitoring your web traffic is only one of the many ways to keep track of your online buzz.  Try searching your artist name on Twitter to see if people are talking about you.  Use Google’s Blog Search to see if people are blogging about you and set up a Google alert so that anytime your artist name is mentioned online you get an update straight to your inbox.

If your interested in using Google Analytics with your HostBaby wizard account, click here.

Additional Resources:

Wikipedia:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

Google Analytics Video:  http://www.youtube.com/profile?v=_qfG2d9etvk&user=googleanalytics&hl=en

How to Make Sense of your Website’s Statistics: http://www.a1-optimization.com/web-statistics.htm