Newbie Needs Help with Stats

[cyrano]

Hello,
This is my first time posting and this is also my first website.
www.proeventsinc.com
I finally had a chance to check out the stats - using Webalizer.
What do I look at to determine the number of visits to my site -- hits, visits, etc? This is confusing to me.
My site went live Dec. 10, 2002 - so I want the total # of hits or visits as of today.

Thanks in advance for any replies and help.

[Chris]

To guage the viewership, I'd go with visits. "Visits" is basically unique IP addresses that go to your site (which is registered roughly about one time a day), each visitor produces hits, which I have been lead to believe is the amount of pages viewed by each visitor.

[cyrano]

Chris,
Thanks for the reply. Will look at the "visits"

[Ravedesigns]

Hey Cyrano,

Unique visitors and Page views are the two things I look at most. Hits are kinda misleading, because if you have a page with 20 graphics on it for example, each time that page is viewed would show 20 hits. I'm not really sure how the HTML on a page is counted, but anyway...still with uniques or page views to get an accurate idea of the traffic on your site.

Oh, and have you looked at the AWStats? I like the info that displays better than webalizer and others.

HTH,

Steve

[Chris]

AWstats and Webalizer are really nothing alike, only when it comes to bandwidth do they agree. One can show 2,000 unique visitors, where as the other can say 200.

Personally, I think AWstats delivers good, accurate data displayed in a very clean fashion.

[Sardtok]

I use both AWStats and Webalizer...
Webalizer can actually resolve ip's to host names, that way you can see regional information about hits...
Webalizer and AWStats mostly agree on everything on my site
(Except for webalizer does not contain pre-merger information...)

Anyway,
hits = File requests from users (every time they send an http file request (if you are looking at website stats anyway) you get another hit, don't think it matters if they actually get the file or not)

visits = number of unique ip adresses that has sent requests to the site (How often a person's ip address changes depends on the ISP, Cable and DSL changes rarely, while modem changes often, and a few people have static ips)

pages = Number of hits to files which are html pages

Well, that's basically it ;) I know I said some things that had already been said, but that's the way love goes, uhm... ;)