I was thinking some more about my Fuzzy Math/Twisted Science post from the other day, and got to thinking that I didn't mean to come across as though there's no value in your web reports. On the other hand completely, you should, but only if you do so with an understanding as to what you're looking at.

So with that in mind, here's my top ten list of important things to understand when you review your traffic. If you want to reference a sample log report, check out Dovetail's Sample Hit Report.

1. Visitor vs. Hit - Everyone wants to know how many hits their site got this month, last month, last year and so on, well I have news for you. Hits don't mean a thing. A hit is just a file - an HTML file, a graphic, a video etc, so if you have 10 graphics on a page, you're going to get at least 11 hits for every view of that page.
    
   You can see how that number quickly gets inflated. So pay attention to your visitor sessions - they are much more meaningful - you can assume that a singe visitor session is a unique person browsing your site for a single period of time - which, based on the site, will cover dozens, hundreds, even thousands of individual hits during their session.
    
2. Page Popularity - Check and see which pages are the most and least visited. This can be useful on any number of counts. You can validate if a traffic driving campaign is effective, or not, if visitors find you through your home page, or other entry point etc. This can help know which pages get the most "eyes" and thus deserve more of your attention in terms of offering up content.
    
3. Entrance and Exit Pages - "Which door do your guests use to enter and exit your house?" My mother used to ask that, which usually meant, make sure the front hall is cleaned best. The same holds true here, not everyone goes straight to your home page - if they come in through a search engine any page is fair game, so understanding where they start is important. Likewise the last page is important too, if it's a "thank  you for buying" page you're doing OK, but if it's a shopping cart page, sales are being left on the counter.
      
4. Referrers - Who's linking to your site. Does someone find you from a search engine, banner ad, or friendly site? This let's you profile traffic before it gets to you so you can understand better how to find your audience.
   
5. Keywords and Search Engines - The Big Kahuna - search engine results! It's one thing to want to be found by a keyword of phrase, and completely another to actually be found by it. Sometimes you've got it all wrong. Sometimes your content isn't supporting your desired words, either way these reports can show what searches were successful at finding your site. This can validate or undermine an SEO or PPC campaign so you can really see how important they are.
    
6. Understanding Geography - The first W in WWW stands for world, but the world starts right outside your own door, so understand where visitors are coming to your site from geographically and understand if you're capturing the right folks. It doesn't do a whole lot of good to receive an inquiry from Queensland, Australia if you're a plumber in Spokane, Washington. BUT BE AWARE: geography is based on IP address, so they can be skewed heavily based on how people connect to the Internet. (Did you know AOL is based in Virginia?)
    
7. Technology - What kind of computers and browsers and operating systems are people using today? It's important because you need to be sure your site works best in the most popular, and conversely if only a small percentage of visits are in one area, you may choose not to spend valuable resources to be compatible - you decide, but either way it's important to know this information.
    
8. Time - We all need more, and never have enough, so it's even that much more critical to know when during the day, week, and month your site is most heavily used as well as how long the average person spends at your site or page.
    
9. Errors - Chances are even the best built sites occasionally experience issues, so knowing how often is important for sure. It's also a good gage to know when your site might be outgrowing its current server or host provider's capabilities.
    
10. Return Visits - Perhaps most import is return traffic. We talked last week about bringing people to your site, if it's working they often come back and this is one way to determine that.

OK, that's it for now, hope you find this useful and as before, if I've forgotten something or you want to weigh in, I encourage you to comment right here at the bottom of this post by clicking the "comments" link.

-- Mike