Although...typically most web analytic tools have been set up (either
by default or during installation) to ignore non-layout pages (gif,
jpg, css, js, inc, cgi, etc) and should just return "hits"
representing single pages. As Robert mentions, though, Google and
other tools do a better job of weeding these out for you. Check your
analytic tool's docs to find out how to ignore the crawler hit's
you're getting.
One note of caution re: Google Analytics. It's amazing for most of
your basic stuff, but it does have some gaps that can seriously affect
your behavioral tracking, marketing and other metrics. I highly
recommend having at least two analytics tools available to use for
general use and for special purposes, unless you can afford one of the
higher end all-encompassing tools such as Omniture. We've been burned
a few times running ad campaigns that were invisible to Google, and
learned the hard way that another tool could have captured those
metrics, if we'd had it installed.
I'll avoid plugging the other tool we found, but a quick search for
web analytics will find some pretty innovative competitors to Google
out there, at very low cost (or free with restrictions).
Bryan Minihan
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
On Jun 17, 2008, at 11:56 AM, Robert Hoekman Jr wrote:
One of the organizations I volunteer for get "hit counts" from Go
Daddy
for its website (www.rutlandhistory.com <http://www.rutlandhistory.com/
>
).
If you're actually looking at "hits", the number will be totally
meaningless. A "hit" is any requested file. This can include XML and
Javascript files, images, includes ... you name it. Anything needed to
render a page. If a single page was comprised of 30 files, you'd get
30 hits
for each time the page is rendered by a user's browser. In that
case, 30
hits = 1 page view.
Sign up for Google Analytics. It will be give you a much more
accurate and
meaningful look into your traffic and usage.
-r-
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