Keith Dsouza

How many times do you head to check your sites stats to see how many visitors you got and who are watching your articles or not.

Well I am a frequent traveller to my stats and I totally smile when I see some high users and frown when I have low visitors.

Though I am not here to talk about my visitors I am here to just let some of my analysis on what each of the components about the stats mean, I term this as a basic to mid level kind of analysis but at some places it may go to expert analysis too.

Your blog or website consists or mainly three types of visitors / visits.

1. Absolute new visitors

These are the visitors that have visited your site for the first time and who have have never visited your site before

 

Sometimes stats obsoletes old  data after sometime and old visitors may still get termed as new visitors , this may also happen when you delete old trackings and start afresh or something went wrong with your backups and you have had to start afresh (This is totally my term so I don't know how many may take it as accurate)

 

3. Repeat visitors 

These are visitors who have already been a previous visitors to your site, if you see the second point then you may also see these visitors as absolute new visitors.

 

These visitors may come from four sources ( I have not seen much anything other than this )

 

1. Search Engines 

Well i don't see much to explain here but this is from people coming to your site after searching in the search engines.

 

2. Referers

These include other sites that link to you, note some stats also show search engines as your referers, though this is absolutely right, Search engines are a entity on their own. Best example is people clicking on other's blogroll to come to your site.

 

3. Direct visits

People who just type in your url in to the address bar

 

4. Advertisement clicks

People coming to your sites by clicking on ads you place, this is another kind of referer but also an entity on its own and the least seen in blogs.

You may have two types of hits to your websites

 

1. Unique Page hits

Number of unique people who have come to your site

 

2. Total Page views

Number of times people have visited your site pages, this is not unique

Another additional thing you can have is

1. Total outbound link clicks

The number of links that go to sites outside

 

2. Adsense clicks

Though you may not have this with all stats.

 

So this is what your stats system usually consists of take or leave a few things here and there.

 

I use a few of the best stats system to analyze my site statastics, as I don't really use my inbuilt stats system much as it calculates everything I do including writing articles etc.

You can use some of these that I suggest Google Anaylytics (I have a couple of invites), Performancing , MyBlogLog (Links tracking)

Out of these, Google analytics is the best for very indepth analysis, Performancing is very good for real time statistical analysis for your site and MyBlogLog is the best way to track your incoming and outgoing links.

Though All the three services are free Mybloglog has a paid service for more professional services.

 

You can check one wordpress tip here.