Taraeta Nicholls's List: NET26

• Referring domains are a good place to start when you are trying to analyze who is linking to your sit
• Some of these you may have link agreements or other business relationships with. Many are likely to be search engines and portal sites.
• By learning this information you can cultivate new relationships with these sites to help ensure that they bring more and better traffic to your site. Or you may decide that you don’t want to be affiliated with a referring domain and ask the site to remove any links.
• In this context these  counts are for the item that was requested from your web site. Usually this is a  page, so Hits and Pages are often about the same.
• Sometimes, you  will have a few hits in your report that are neither Downloads nor Pages. This  often means that another site is including graphics from your site in their  pages.
• Summary provides columns of “Recent Hits.” In Figure 2, you can see that some domains  would be ranked higher in total historical hits than they are when sorted by Recent Hits. The Recent Hits value is usually a count of hits in the past two  to three weeks. By comparing this short period to the historical total, you can see changes in trends as they are happening. This can be invaluable in helping you stay on top of changes in your traffic and allowing you to respond quickly to a fluctuating market place.
• The number of hits generated by a referrer may be interesting, but may not be the most important thing you want a referrer to produce. Most web sites have specific goals and as a web site marketer you want to know whether the site is meeting those goals and which referrers are sending you visitors that achieve those goals.
• One of the simplest qualities might be Pages, rather than hits, especially if your web site is content driven or funded by advertising. If you are publishing software or other download-able content, Downloads is an important metric to follow. Figure 3 introduces additional quantities that could help determine the quality of a referrer. Average Steps tells you,on average, how many non-graphic hits each visitor from that referring domain had as they navigated through your site. This can be especially important when you are delivering advertising, as it tells you how many potential impressions each visit from a given referrer had.
• Sometimes you may have goals that are specific to your site, such as visitors who  make it to the checkout page
• Once you know which sites are sending you visitors, you will probably want  to know what pages on those sites link to yours. When you click on any of the  Referring Domains listed in the Referring Domains Report, Summary will show  you a list of selected referrers, pages on sites within that domain that link to  your site.

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• The most accurate way of counting users is to require them to login. If you use your web server’s authentication system, then each user’s request will be associated with his username.
• Unfortunately, most websites do not require login
• So without requiring authentication, visitors and their visits have to be estimated
• In the past an estimate of unique visitors could be found by looking at the Unique Hosts.
• When the Internet first started, each computer connected to it had its own host address, so a count of unique hosts was usually a good indicator of the number of unique visitors you had in a given period.
• There is still value to counting unique hosts. A comparative value of unique hosts as a trend over time can be indicative of the reach or breadth of coverage that your website is getting. If you increase the number of unique hosts per month in a six month period, then you probably reaching a broader group of visitors.
• A given user may visit the site three distinct times in the course of a month. This would count as three visits.
• The nature of the web makes it impossible to know exactly what requests belong to each individual visit, but Summary uses advanced statistical analysis methods to estimate this. The Visit count can therefore be used as an estimate of the number of visits that occurred in a period
• This is because a visit is often defined as a series of consecutive requests from a given user bounded by inactivity.
• Another common term for visits is ‘sessions.’
• One of the most common techniques for improving visit metrics and request data in general is to configure your web server to send out a ‘session cookie.’ A cookie is a small bit of information that your site can have visitors store with their browsers. Whenever they request a page, the browser sends the cookie back to your server.
• With a properly configured server and properly configured analysis software, you can even use these cookies to help the software figure out what requests comprise each visit.
• web server to log outgoing and incoming cookies so that you can correlate the first request with subsequent requests in a visit.
• While this is much more accurate than the heuristic approach, especially when dealing with proxy sharing, it does not provide a perfect solution. Some users will adamantly refuse to accept cookies from your sites. Other user agents (like robots or spiders) never accept cookies. Finally, some firewalls and proxies will strip cookies from requests completely. If you require users to accept cookies, you may be blocking a large number of potential visitors. If you do not, then you are back to having some visits without cookie data and the previously mentioned issues all return.

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• Most sites are not lucky enough to get explicit user feedback.
• If they get frustrated or cannot seem to make your site work the way they want to, get confused or feel their privacy is being invaded, they will likely move on to another site.
• The web allows you to publish your business or content to a very large audience, very easily. But that does not change the need to make sure you understand your audience
• you can use web analytics  to gain not just more customers, but more valuable customers.
• web analytics can be used to diagnose server or site problems, and measure the effectiveness of marketing and advertising campaigns.

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• Hit counters serve their purpose, but only provide basic information. Web analytics allows you to go much deeper, without losing this basic information.
• A single page load can result in many ‘hits.’
• When requests for a particular item, such as a page or advertisement are counted, these hits can nominally indicate how many times the item was  seen and are therefore sometimes counted as impressions.
• So if a single request to the home page can generate many hits in your logs, what value is a hit count? Mainly it is useful for managing or monitoring the load on your server. Each hit represents a single network request.
• It can be indicative of the user experience.
• Page hits are a much more useful metric than hits for analyzing user experience.
• Graphics Hits,” as shown in Figure 1, are the number of requests for images, animations or other graphics. Graphics are often larger than the content of a page and take up a good portion of bandwidth as well as requiring the visitor to wait while the page loads.
• This can be programs, archives, zip files, or PDF documents that users download from your site
• . Notice the columns of Errors, Bytes, Unique Hosts and Visits. Errors are simply a count of the number of requests for items that did not complete – either because they were not there or could not be produced. It is a quick measurement of your site’s diagnostics.
• The count of bytes in a period is very useful for tracking the bandwidth usage on your network. I
• You can also use bytes to assist in improving the design of the site. Individual pages can take a long time to load if the graphics they reference are large. You can look at the ratio of Bytes to Pages in a report and determine the load-average for each page on your site.
• If this number is greater than 30KB, you might want to look at the site and reduce the size of some images or reduce the number of images loaded by each page. If it is significantly above 100KB, there are going to be lots of users who are waiting a long time to load the page.

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