Web site statistics questions

Yep, bots, search engines crawlers, anyone who stumbles directly into your site and if you’ve had any pages up already, people who have found you via those same search engines. Your visitors are probably mostly bots though if its early days.

Ok quick crash course for you – an IP address essentially relates to a person or a bot. A person or bot might look at 10 pages on your site. That’s 1 unique visitor making 10 unique page views.

Two people might look at five pages each, and each reload one of those pages. So that’s 2 unique visitors, 10 unique page views (as the two reloaded pages aren’t counted), and 12 page views (as the reloaded pages are counted there). Make sense?

You get the basic idea I’m sure.

Separating bots from real people is the key as you say. There’s an absolute ton of bots on the web. A good stats package will do that for you. I’d recommend signing up for a free Google Analytics account. Then install a Google Analytics plugin and you’ll get a pretty good breakdown of your visitors and more things than you’ll ever care to know about who is reading your site. Plus some perdy graphs.

Hope that helps. In reality it’s a bit more complicated than that. It is possible for more than one person (or a whole company) to share an IP address for example and may appear to some more basic stats programs as just 1 unique visitor. Like I say though, that’s the basics covered I think. 🙂