When it comes to Internet statistics the most important statistic at the end of the day is how many orders or inquiries did you get. However, your ability to improve your orders and site performance will depend on your understanding of your website’s other underlying traffic statistics. Here are some things to watch out for. First of all, forget about “hits”. Whenever someone requests a file it is a hit. If you visit a web page, then you are requesting several files all at once: the file for the page and the files for all the graphics on the page. By visiting one page on a site you are registering several hits. “Hits” is a very vague term and doesn’t give you a good picture of what is happening on your site.

Another important Internet statistic to keep you eye on are the referrers. A referrer is the website where a person was visiting prior to landing on your site. Search engines are important referrers, and sites that link to you are other referrers. Compare your referred traffic to total traffic and you will see how many people just typed in your url and how many came after seeing your link in another location. Knowing where your visitors came from is very important, but it is even better if you can get more details about this kind of traffic. That is why you should also look for the search terms that people used when coming from a search engine. Most trackers or log analysis program will give you the search terms that were used on the referring search engines.