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Creating a Successful Website

Measuring Hits, Page Views, and User Sessions

Many innkeepers send us mail asking how many hits our site receives so they can better determine how to spend their marketing dollars. From our discussions with innkeepers, we found that a lot of confusion surrounds the statistical numbers assigned to a web page. We hope to clear up here the three types of statistics most innkeepers use to gauge a web page's popularity.

• Hits
• Page views
• User session

Before we explain these terms, it helps to know how information is sent, received, and recorded for each website. When users visit your web page, your server delivers your information to them in their browser. At the same time, the user's browser is sending information about the user to a log file that exists on your server. The log file contains user information such as the date and time the user visited your web page, the user's IP address, the type of browser used, display size, and so on. A complete explanation of an IP address would take a separate article, but for our purposes, the IP address is the numeric address allocated to users when they dial up and log into their internet service provider. User's with DSL or Cable service are assigned a permanent IP address.

Most servers run monthly statistics programs that analyze this information and present it to you in a format by which you can determine how many users are visiting and where they are from. A number of free tracking utilities also exist, but they do not use your server's log data. They range from simple hit counters that have a low level of statistical information to more complex trackers that track and record data on a separate server. The accuracy of the free methods depends both on an external server and perfectly working software.

What is a hit?
A hit is simply the number of requests to a web server for a particular file. The total number of hits for a site includes all files (.html, .jpeg, .gif, .wav, etc.) that were returned to the user's browser. For example, a user visits an inn's website that has seven html files. Each file has three graphics files (photos), and one of the seven files has an audio file that serves up music. The user clicks on all seven files, views all photos, and listens to the audio. The total number of hits for this transfer of information is 29 (7 (files) + 21 (graphics) + 1 (music file) ).

What is a page view?
A page view, on the other hand, is the number of pages (.htm or .html files) that are viewed for each user session. This number does not include the supporting graphics, audio files, movie files, etc. The number of page views will always be lower than the number of hits. In the "hits" example, there would be a total of 7 page views.

What is a user session?
One user session is counted for each user or customer that comes to your website. It doesn't matter how many pages the user views, he or she is counted as one user. Measuring user sessions is probably the most complex of the measurements because it is so hard to track. However, it also provides the most useful gauge of how your website is doing.

Tracking the number of visitors
Three methods can be used to track the number of unique visitors to a site.

• The most accurate measure is to require visitors to use a user name and password every time they access the site. This makes it possible to uniquely identify each user's visit to your site.
  
• The second method is for the web page to assign and track a "cookie" that contains the user's IP address or other information. A cookie, in this case, a program, captures the user's IP address and stores it on the user's computer so that it can later be retrieved when the user revisits a website. Some users refuse to accept cookies, so this method is not always accurate.
  
• The final method is to track IP addresses through your log file. Each time a visitor comes to your page, that person's IP address is recorded in the log file as a visitor. This method is also subject to inaccuracies. Most websites have a time limit for each IP address, so if no activity is recorded for 30 minutes and the user then returns, the IP address would be counted again as a unique visitor.

Summary
In final analysis, it seems as if the statistics measures outlined in this article are impicise at best. This is true in a because mounting privacy issues will always mean that precise counting of all visitors to a website is impossible. The question then is how to use these measures to guage the success or failure of your website or your advertising dollars. We at IBBP.com and BnB4sale look at these number as a guage of how our site is doing and use three tracking tools to compile an average of visitors to our site. We use WebTrends log analyzer tool and the free statistic tool that comes with our server software to analyze or servers log files and place the external free tracker ExtremeTracker on all of our innkeepers pages. However, the final success or failure of our site or an inn's site is determined by how many guests arrive at their accommodation.