Your web hosting provider should offer you "Usage Statistics" or "Web Stats" with your account. These statistics are an invaluable resource when it comes to gauging if all of your marketing efforts are paying off in visitors to your website. A nice statistics code will offer you the following understanding:

* Number of unique user sessions - This is s a measurement of one persons time and activity on your website and the most accurate way to gauge how many times your web site has been visited.
* User sessions per day - This is the daily measurement of how many unique visitors came to your web page , what instant of day they were coming most, etc.
* Average amount of time spent on page per user - This enables you to tell how effective your web site is at holding a visitors attention span.
* Number of page views, broken down by page - Page views are how many times a page is loaded and presented to a viewer. The same viewer might view the same page multiple times, so this is not as accurate as the unique user sessions number.
* Most popular pages - This is helpful in determining which pages your visitors view the most.
* Top paths through site - This is a virtual "map" of which pages your visitors will view in their session.
* Top Entrance page - Surprisingly, this is not always your home page! By checking this statistic, you may tell if certain pages seem to have more interest or external links to them than others.
* Top Exit page - It is also helpful to understand what the most popular pages are when a visitor decides to finish their session.
* Top referring urls - This is quite helpful to see which web sites are driving visitors to your website the most.
* Most popular keywords/key phrases - Another great resource is learning which keywords visitors are using to find your website .
* Month to month stats - Statistics are usually logged by the month, so that you might compare your traffic from one month to the next.

But What About "Hits"?

"Hits" is a very confusing term used to describe how many times a web page, or an product on a web page has been returned for the user. For instance, your home page has 10 images on it that generate up the graphics on the page. A visitor comes in and simply by looking at your home page, a statistics program might log 11 hits (1 for each image returned and 1 for the page itself). It is for this reason that your page "hits" may be a very misleading number. The most accurate representation of how popular your internet site is will always be "unique users" or "unique visits".