18 March 2010

Basic Website Traffic Terminology

Page Views: The number of pages viewed is the basis of analytics and site traffic. At best, page views are a rough measurement. They’re the building blocks of analytics. Click backs and refreshed pages get double counted, while partial page loads can be counted differently. They need to be factored in to make statistics accurate.

Unique Page Views: A filtered view based on the number of pages a visitor views without the duplication of double visits to various pages. Duplicated visits can be examined with another view for visitor pathing. Whether a unique should be defined as unique to a session or some other time frame is subject to interpretation.

Frequently Visited Pages: The popularity and number of pages can show what content brings in long tail traffic and other insightful facts.

Visitors: The start of all in-depth analytics. Visitors are customers and users of your services in whatever capacity they come in. Visitors can be associated with so many factors — but most importantly they’re the ones that take action. A standard of their measurement should be established. Without a cookie or information about the visitor’s IP address, the accuracy of this number varies greatly.

Unique Visitors: Similar to page views (separated by a time frame), a unique visitor is generally one who’s visited once during a day, week, or month. The length of time can be segmented by many analytics programs — exactly how is the issue.