Chapter 34
Understand Analytics Data
“My website gets 30,000 visitors per month!”
That's what a very talkative guy once told me at a networking event. He wasn't the first person to proudly share such information with me. People are often quick to blurt out how much traffic their websites are supposedly getting. Turns out, you can find out a lot about someone else's website all on your own. But before we get to that, let me explain a few important distinctions.
First, a “hit” is not a “visitor.” A hit is any click on any link on your website. If you have a bunch of links and someone visits your site and starts browsing around, they can easily rack up 20 or 30 hits during one visit. Most people who claim their website is getting thousands of visitors are misreading their analytics. Those websites might be getting thousands of hits but far fewer visitors. In the case of the guy above who claimed 30,000 visitors, I later found out his website was only getting about 1,500 visitors per month—not bad, but not great either. Going a step further, a visitor is not the same as an “absolute unique visitor.” If you visit your own website twice each day, you could be accounting for 50 or 60 visits (and 1,000+ hits) each month. When reading your analytics, you want to see how many absolute unique visitors you're getting. That's the important number.
Here in the United States, you can get a fairly good idea how many visitors a site is getting by checking its Alexa ranking. Alexa is the largest ...
