A few weeks ago one of my customers had a question about her website statistics program. “When I look at my website report page with the second highest number of page views is ‘/’. What page is that?”
Excellent question. The “/” in the stats program indicates the home page. However you’ll want to look at the report closely. Statistics for the home page are often broken down into two different numbers. You have to add those two numbers together to get the correct figure.
Let’s look at an example. In the case of this site, https://www.perryweb.com, statistics for the home page would show as either “/” or as “/index.shtml”. In other words, both https://www.perryweb.com and https://www.perryweb.com/index.shtml will take you to the home page of my website. The stats program isn’t smart enough to know that those are the same page.
As an aside, your website may have index.php, index.html or some other type of index page. The point is that no matter what technology your using, your stats program may be recoding statistics for your home page in two different groups.
Does it matter if people go to www.perryweb.com or www.perryweb.com/index.shtml? Not a bit. What matters is having visitors to your website. You just need to keep the above in mind when looking at the statistics package for your website.
What I want to know is, what is the best stats program to use to make your stats look really good?!
Seriously, I’d like to learn more about how stats programs vary, and how much we should believe the stats figures that other people tell us.
I’ll keep this in mind for future posts. In the meantime, have you tried Google Analytics? The system is free for most people and has a great presentation.