Coastal Services Center

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Web Site Metrics (1 of 1)

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Understanding Web Metrics

If you have ever heard people talking about how many "hits" or "visitors" a Web site gets, then you have heard of Web metrics. There are essentially two types of Web metrics, basic and advanced. Basic metrics require no special tools; the information is available in the standard log files generated by most Web servers. These files include information about:

• visitors
• date and time stamps
• what files were accessed
• where the visitors came from
• and the types of browsers they used.

But while basic metrics are easy to track, they're not all that useful. More advanced methods combine several basic metrics to yield more sophisticated and useful information, such as impressions and numbers of unique and non-unique visitors.

 

Note: Some analysis tools track unique visitors by assuming that each user with the same IP address and the same browser is a unique visitor. These tools look at the log files line by line and count up the matches, either manually or automatically. But tying technical transaction data to actual people isn't very reliable.