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Web site Statistics
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Web Site Statistics Versus Truth
Ami Isseroff
Sept 26, 2008
This article was inspired by a letter that someone sent, boasting that his Web site had a very large
number visitors each year. You will probably run into such "statistics" in trying to evaluate your site, or the success
of your search engine optimization contractor or in checking a Web site where you might want to advertise or a site to
buy.
At one time, it was easy to make such boasts based on "hits," "pageviews" about sites with private
statistics programs, because there was no way to check them.
Honest Web site statistics
are the real measure of the success of your Web site or the popularity of someone else's Web site, regardless how well
or poorly your web pages place in search engines.
But honest Web site statistics are hard to come by. Each metering system produces different measures
and defines them differently. A site may have 1,000 visitors in a week (actual visitors who came to the site on a given
day), 2,000 "sessions" of 30 minutes duration (connection between a user and the server), 3,500 "pageviews" and 10,000
"hits" (downloads of different files. A "visitor" defined by one system may not be the same as a "visitor" defined by
another system.
So you can tell people any numbers you like, right? Wrong. In the last few
years, the visitor statistics of Web sites are no longer secret.
At Alexa
http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/
or Compete
http://www.compete.com and
several similar sites, anyone can find the approximate numbers of visitors coming to a site either in absolute figures
or relative to total market share and relative to other sites. Note that Compete.com estimates US traffic and the
estimates seem to be about 1/4 the actual traffic. Alexa is more accurate, but you will need to calculate visitors
from market share in percent You can also use those numbers to evaluate your statistics program. If it is
generating numbers very different from those in Alexa, it may not be showing visitors.
You can also do some more sophisticated Web site optimization metrics.
Using the "Site" search at Google, you can check how many pages there are at a Web site. for example site:mysite.com
will tell you how many pages there are at mysite.com. Site A that gets a million visitors a week is "better" than
site B that gets only 100,000 visitors a week. But suppose that the million visitor site has 2 million pages, while the
100,000 visitor site has only 10,000 pages? That would mean that a page at site A gets half a visitor a week, while a
page at site B gets 10 visitors a week. Be aware that "site" tabulation of number of pages is not accurate at all, and
may be grossly inflated. For example, Google may count a page at site.com/page.htm and then count the same page again as
www.site.com/page.htm. Automatically built sites may have numerous "garbage"
pages that are generated in various ways.
Ami Isseroff
Notice: Copyright
All materials are copyright 2008 by Ami Isseroff. All rights reserved. These pages may not be reproduced in any
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