y or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! ImporEvery time someone visits your website the web server starts tracking the activities of that visitor in what is called the 'web log'. If understood, the web log can provide valuable information about the popularity and reach of your website, and much more, as we will explore below.

Be aware; the contents of the web log will not be 100% accurate so rather than using it as measure by which you pay your staff, for instance, you should use it as a guide and for identifying trends. To be able to get valid trend information, as with all statistical analysis, the longer the time period and greater the volume of information, the more useful the statistics will be.

One more thing to draw to your attention before we get started: you will need a reliable web log analysis tool in order to be able to discover the information I am about to take you through. The web log itself is just a large text file full of lines of data that describe a visitor’s steps through a site. Making sense of those thousands and thousands of lines of text requires a tool to sort the data, collate and present it to you in a useful format.

I recently conducted a review of a number of tools, and found 'Absolute Log Analyzer' from B1tStr1ke software to have the right mix of functionality, usability and value for money.

** Visits vs Hits **

The first thing you are likely to see when you are navigating through the results in your web log analysis tool is that you have hundreds or thousands of hits to your site in any given day or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! Import

ure by which you pay your staff, for instance, you should use it as a guide and for identifying trends. To be able to get valid trend information, as with all statistical analysis, the longer the time period and greater the volume of information, the more useful the statistics will be.

One more thing to draw to your attention before we get started: you will need a reliable web log analysis tool in order to be able to discover the information I am about to take you through. The web log itself is just a large text file full of lines of data that describe a visitor’s steps through a site. Making sense of those thousands and thousands of lines of text requires a tool to sort the data, collate and present it to you in a useful format.

I recently conducted a review of a number of tools, and found 'Absolute Log Analyzer' from B1tStr1ke software to have the right mix of functionality, usability and value for money.

** Visits vs Hits **

The first thing you are likely to see when you are navigating through the results in your web log analysis tool is that you have hundreds or thousands of hits to your site in any given day or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! Impor

log analysis tool in order to be able to discover the information I am about to take you through. The web log itself is just a large text file full of lines of data that describe a visitor’s steps through a site. Making sense of those thousands and thousands of lines of text requires a tool to sort the data, collate and present it to you in a useful format.

I recently conducted a review of a number of tools, and found 'Absolute Log Analyzer' from B1tStr1ke software to have the right mix of functionality, usability and value for money.

** Visits vs Hits **

The first thing you are likely to see when you are navigating through the results in your web log analysis tool is that you have hundreds or thousands of hits to your site in any given day or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! Impor

ducted a review of a number of tools, and found 'Absolute Log Analyzer' from B1tStr1ke software to have the right mix of functionality, usability and value for money.

** Visits vs Hits **

The first thing you are likely to see when you are navigating through the results in your web log analysis tool is that you have hundreds or thousands of hits to your site in any given day or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! Impor

y or month. Woohoo!!! You didn’t realise how popular it was, right? The key thing here is that a hit is recorded every time an image, page or other page element is required from the web server in order to display the page to a visitor. If your home page contains 13 different elements, every time a visitor goes to that page, it will add another 13 hits to your hit count! Important tip: it is the number of Visits that tells you how many visitors you’ve had in a particular time period, not the number of Hits.

** Unique Visitors **

Clearly the number of visits may be made up of the one person visiting your site multiple times per day, it may consist of entirely unique visitors, or more likely, a combination of both. The better web log analysis tools enable you to see how many unique visitors there were to your site over a given timeframe.

If you view the number of unique visitors over a longer period of time, you can start to get a feel for your success in improving the reach of your website over time, and whether the number of visitors has stagnated.

Unique visitors must certainly only be used as a guide; if a person visits your website from home and from work, they will most probably be viewed as two different visitors. On the other hand, if a large company has many different people, from the same location, visiting your site, chances are they will all be recorded as one unique visitor.

** Return Visitors **

Another way of looking at the Unique Visitors vs. Total Visitors statistics is as a measure of your efforts to get visitors to come back again and again to your site; perhaps to obtain more information about your services or to order additional products. Where building repeat business or building community is part of your strategy, this is a very important measure.

** Pathway through your Website **

Some of the more sophisticated web log