2.4 Website Statisitics (Web Stats)
It is important for web designers and owners to be able to monitor visitor traffic to their websites. Most web hosting packages will include some form of web statistics reporting as standard, but additional free software is available, such as www.webalizer.org and www.google.com/analytics (although the latter requires you to add their code snippets into your HTML documents).
Web statistical tools will give you data reports for all the traffic to your site on a hourly to monthly basis, including where that traffic comes from, any search strings used, the entry and exit pages visitors used, whaa browsers visitors used, the number of visits and hits and much more. This is very useful feedback that can help you tweak or improve your site to meet the demands of your visitors.
Visits are more important than hits
This is an important point to understand. A hit occurs when a web server sends a file, any file, to a browser. A visit occurs when a visitor (human or robot) visits a website.
Confused? Don't worry. A visit can consist of one or more page views, and a page view occurs when a visitor views a webpage. Now then, that webpage is a file that may consist of many other files. For example, any images included in a webpage are seperate files (.gif/.jpeg/.png). So when a visitor views that webpage, numerous images may be displayed which generate multiple hits for that single page.
For example: if a page had 5 pictures, then a request to the server to view that page generates 6 hits - 5 for the pictures and 1 for the HTML file. So a single page view can contain hundreds of hits. This is the reason why we measure web traffic via page views and not hits. Hits are not a reliable way to measure traffic.