Do you check your website logs? Well, many real estate agents that I’ve met don’t. So when questions of hits, pages, and sessions come up, guess what? They didn’t have a clue. Read on and you may very quickly be ahead of most of your peers.
There are two goals with this post. Or, at least, there should be two goals for you.
- Review your website statistics.
- Understand your website statistics.
Reviewing your website statistics
So why bother?
Is this just a bunch of extra website trivia that you’ll never need again? No way! Knowing the difference between the number of hits, the number of page views, and the number of other visitor statistics is critical to monitoring your website’s and your marketing’s effectiveness.
You see, these important quantitative factors can reveal things like:
- Usability issues that need to be resolved
- Ineffective pages that need to be improved
- Hot content that should be moved to the front page
- Poorly targetted advertising that needs to be refocused
- Wasted advertising dollars that should be reallocated
Yep, these are statistics that could drastically impact your bottom line.
Most visited page example
For example, say you know that one of your most visited pages is:
http://yourrealestatewebsite.com/buyers/step-to-buying-a-house.html.
You also know that to get there visitors normally click through a series of pages or navigation menus. So why isn’t it on the front page?! Pages like these need to be moved upfront. It’s all about making things easier for your visitors.
Lots of hits example
Another example… You are receiving 1,000 hits a day to your home search page. Is this good or bad? Well, are the hits real people, search engine robots, or something else? Reviewing and understanding your stats, you learn that it was one website that was scraping your listings and redisplaying on their website. Hmm… I’d say that’s bad.
Understand your website statistics
From this post you probably won’t become an expert in website statistical analysis. However, you’ll have a better understanding of some of the information you’ll see in common web visitor reports. Following are three commonly used terms that are errantly interchanged:
- Hits
- Page Views
- Sessions
I will only define the three listed here since I hear people use these most frequently and incorrectly. There are many other terms that are found in site reports. So if you have questions on any of them, please comment below or shoot me an email.
Hits
This, purely based on my opinion, is the most touted number among website owners. The false success of many sites are based on the boasting of this near-meaningless number. Yep, meaningless.
Hits are the number of times an individual file is requested.
Rubber-meets-the-road example: So let’s say your home page is simple. It has a graphic of your logo, a photo of you, and photos of three featured homes. You also might have a separate style sheet that’s attached to make things look all pretty.
If anyone opens up your home page, that’s at least seven hits. Count ‘em. Seven.
So how’d I get that? Check out the definition again. Each file adds “1″ to your website’s overall hit count. This information doesn’t say whether the visitor was using Internet Explorer, or if they were on a Mac, or even if they’ve visited before. Yet, somehow people use it to definitively say how popular their site is. A site with a million “hits” a day may simply have a lot of images on their pages with very few actual visitors.
Page Views
This one is a little better for touting. It has a little more meaning that can be tied to pages visited.
Page Views are the number of times a page (including all images) is viewed.
Simple, huh? Where hits count every little image that’s referenced in a document, page views lumps it all together. The previous example resulted in seven hits. When counting page views, the result is only one. Can you see how it’s slightly more meaningful?
Sessions
Sometime called “visits,” this is where website dollars can be counted.
Sessions are the number of times a visitor viewed the website
The example: If a visitor came to your site and browsed 100 pages of your website and clicked refresh ten times for each page, what’s the session count? Just “1″.
It doesn’t matter how many files they downloaded or how many pages the visited. Your stats program will say that you had one visitor. They may have roamed all around and got into some things that they shouldn’t have (be glad it’s just a website and not your house), they’re still just one visitor who visited once. That’s one session.
Now if they left and came back later in the day, they’ll start another visit or session. That would be the second session in one day. They’re still one visitor, but they now have two sessions.
Didn’t know I was going to give a math lessone when I started this.
Get statisticking!
So, is everything clear as mud? 
Let me know your questions!
You, hopefully, have enough info to be dangerous to your peers (in a safe, business sort of way). Reading your website statistics may not always be fun, but it can reveal some interesting things about how well your dollars are being spent.
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