A lot of people who are just starting out tend to get confused as to which is the best way to track their results. Many webhosting providers offer built in statistics and there are numerous free and paid services you can utilize to count your visitors for you. But in the end, what does all this data really tell you?
Back in the early days of the web, hits were all the rage. You pretty much weren’t worth a darn if your site didn’t have a high hitcount. While this method of tracking is still in use today, it is only a small fraction of the overall picture of a site’s performance. And yet, as you may have already found out yourself, there is still no single measure of performance that will suffice for everyone. Let’s take a look at some of the tracking methods available, shall we?
- Hits
A hit is a measurement of the files that are served up into a browser. Let’s say that I have a single page with about 10 files that make up the entire page. If 1 person visits that page, I would essentially get 10 hits. Can you see why this is not necessarily the best measure to use? However, as you’ll see, it still provides you with some information that can help you piece together the bigger picture. - Unique Visitors
Unique visitors sounds like a great way to track how many actual people are coming to your site doesn’t it? Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way. It counts how many unique IP addresses visit your site. The problem with this is that the phrase “unique ip addresses” can be a bit of an oxymoron, thanks to NAT. NAT is network address translation. I’ll try to make this quick. NAT was put into use in order to save valuable IP addresses which we would have run out of at least 6 times over by now if we hadn’t started using NAT. There are many internet service providers who use NAT to “hide” all of their users behind a single or a small number of ip addresses. AOL is well known for doing this. NAT is actually a very good thing for the internet, but it is not a very good thing if you want to count unique visitors. You could have 1 million AOL users visit your site this week and you may only see a small number of unique visitors. See the flaw in using this metric? - Pageviews
Pageviews are similar to hits except they count the pages themselves rather than the files that make up the pages. I find this to be a very good measure of what people are looking at, but it still doesn’t necessarily tell me how many people visited my site. - Clickthroughs
Being in affiliate marketing, this is a stat that you will use constantly. Your CTR, or click-thru rate, is going to show up on every single reporting page you look at when you check out your affiliate account stats for Linkshare, Commission Junction, etc. This is a very good way to tell how your ads are performing in terms of how many clicks you are getting. However it falls short of telling you just how well you are actually performing in terms of sales. It used to be that a high CTR translated into a high number of sales, but this is starting to change. People are used to banners and tend to block them out fairly easily now. What this means for you is that you must find other ways to get their attention. If you are successful, you may find that even a low CTR could result in a high rate of sales. If you see this trend happening, you are doing something right because the challenge today is to get quality over quantity where your clicks are concerned. - Reach
Feedburner, now owned by Google, is a site that I use to handle my RSS feeds. They give me some good stats on how my feeds are performing and one of the metrics they offer is reach. The easiest way to describe what your reach is would be to say that it is a metric that looks at how many randomly selected visitors have been to your page. I couldn’t tell you how they actually measure this. I’m sure it’s some ridiculous algorithm that only a physicist would fully understand. But for the rest of us, this can help determine what our site’s advertising value might be worth. I liken it to the Nielsen ratings in television. To be honest, this really should not be a main concern of yours unless you are selling to the big companies out there. If you are then you already know what Reach is and have no need to read this article, lol. - Interactive stats
Many of todays top performing sites track visitors in ways that are far more interactive in nature than the previously listed stats. For example, you might use your subscriptions and registrations as a means of determining your performance. Look at how many newly registered visitors or subscribers to your blog you get each month and this can tell you a lot about how well you are doing. You can also look at stats that tell you how long people are staying on your site, how often the repeat visitors are coming back. Also how many links are referring people your way, which is definitely one way Google tends to use in order to rank your site in their directory. - Putting it all together
Now that you know a little bit more about what all these numbers can tell you, you can probably see that there really is no single method to use to tell how well your site is performing. The fact is, you must use all of these stats available to you in order to truly determine if you are meeting your goals. Of course, the most effective method of all is to look at how much your commission check is each month - that is my favorite way to measure my site’s performance!
If you aren’t measuring your site by any conventional means, I do highly recommend Google Analytics. It’s free and all you need to do is place some invisible code on all of your pages. It provides you with very good information and can even help you manage your adsense campaign performance.
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