Every website can use Google Analytics to generate a web traffic reports. If you don’t have experience, these reports are quite difficult to understand. First of all, you need to know what a page, a hit and a visit. If you don’t then the report will be pretty useless. So, we thought we’d help you out, and explain some of the terms. That way, next time you should be able to understand the report (rather than just nod and smile).

To start with, here are some simple definitions for you:

• Hit: a query from a web client (such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape) for files saved on a server. So, each time a visitor types in a website URL, the internet browser ‘hits’ the website’s server for the documents that should be displayed on the website. So, a logo is a hit, a background image is another hit, a music file is another hit and text is yet another hit. So, as you can see, using the number of ‘hits’ as a measure for the success of a website is not accurate. The more elements on a page, the more hits.
• File: a Hit that eventuated into the downloading of a file. There are always less files than hits. In an ideal world, these numbers would be exactly the same. Unfortunately, web connections time out, users get bored and navigate away from a site before the file is loaded and so on.
• Page: one whole webpage, which is usually comprised of separate files. For example, a website homepage might be made up of three images and some text. In this case, there will be four hits and four files that constitute the homepage.
• Visit: when someone visits a website, the time for which they are logged onto the website is known as a visit. If they leave your site, and then return within a couple of minutes, this still usually counted as one visit.
• User client (sometimes also known as user agent): this IT speak for an internet browser that is used to access a website (think Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla).
• Search terms: sometimes when people use a search engine (like Google), the search engine will take note of which words the user is searching to get to your website. This is helpful, especially for keywords and adwords.
• Unique visitors: every computer connects to the internet via an IP address. An IP address is unique. It is very similar to a phone number; no two IP addresses are the same. So every time a user with a new IP address logs on to your website, this is a unique visitor.
• Bandwidth: if you have a busy, successful website, then bandwidth will be expensive. Bandwidth is the amount of data that is sent out into cyberspace from a server. Images, graphics and text occupy space on servers. Websites that have videos or audio files use a lot more bandwidth than sites that rely on text.