How can I see how many people visit my website?
Last updated 22nd September 2011
It's great to know how many people are viewing your website, not just for marketing purposes, but also just out of interest.
Awstats:
If your site is hosted with us all our hosting accounts come with Awstats enabled by default. If you don't know how to access Awstats for your website, please fill in the form below and we'll send you the details.
Explanation of Awstats terms:
Unique Visitors are exactly that - how many unique/different people visited the site.
Number of Visits is how many people visited your site completely, meaning some came back more than once.
Whilst Unique Visitors is the important one, it's good for Number of Visits to be high, because it means people like your site and are coming back. And statistics show it takes people on average 7 visits or thereabouts to buy something/use a service. Of course some of those visitors will be you and us!
Pages is how many different pages of the site were looked at. If this number is much higher than your visitor numbers it means people are having a good look around and not just landing on a page and leaving again.
Hits is how many files were requested - how many requests the server received. So each time a picture loads on your website, that's a hit. So on your home page, you might have a logo, a couple of other photos, the home page itself, the style sheet that tells it how to look.... So for 1 person visiting your home page you'll get several hits. Therefore hits really aren't worth counting - it's the expression everyone used to use, but now it's about Unique Visitors.
You might also like to have a read of their FAQ page which explains how to read the statistics in more detail.
Google Analytics:
If Awstats doesn't provide enough detail, you want prettier graphics or your site isn't hosted with us, then we'd recommend setting up Google Analytics on your website.
Google Analytics is a free to use service provided by Google. All you need to do is add a little bit of javascript code to every page of your website (typically this simply involves editing a single template file on sites we build).
Contact us via the form below for further help getting this setup or if you have any other specific questions about website statistics.