Count Your Visits, Check Your Page Views
Evaluating a website is not easy. Since you don't get to interact with your users on a regular basis, often you have to try to read your their minds based on what the server logs tell you. In addition, the meaning of the vocabulary used in the field of web analytics isn't always obvious. (If you don't believe me, check out this list from WebTrends. It's nine pages when printed!)
The good news: you don't need to know a lot of definitions or look at a lot of numbers to keep your finger on the pulse of your website. Personally, I look at two on a regular basis: visits and page views.
A visit is just like it sounds. It's a visit to your site. It is not a hit. Visits give you a general idea of how many people are using your site. Those people, however, are not necessarily unique. For example, let's say you read technola every day. Your visits during September might be counted as 30 visits or 1 visit, depending on how technola counts visits and the settings on your local computer. Or, if you got up from your computer and had left technola up in your browser and your co-worker came in and started reading and surfing around, technola has no way of knowing that your co-worker isn't you and would most likely count your co-worker's activity as part of your visit.
A page view occurs when someone views a page on your website. It is also not a hit. This number gives you an idea of what content people are looking at. By comparing this with the number of visits, you get a picture of whether people are coming to your site and reading multiple pages or whether they look at one page and leave. (Either of these cases could be good or bad depending on the length of time that a person spends the site, the purpose of the pages they are viewing, and whether you are an optimist or a pessimist.)
Of course, there are many other numbers that you can use to glean additional data. But for me, when I just need to check in, these are the two numbers that I rely on. They give me a good overview of what's going on and signal if I need pull out my crystal ball and try to figure out more about what my users have been up to. - K
