People often mistake hits for impressions when they read their traffic report. They get excited when they see a large number of hits. Hits are not impressions and the difference is very important. Every time a request is made to your web server for a file (be it HTML, an image, javascript, or css files) your server records an entry in a log file. Then when a log analysis program reads the log file it reports total hits.

If your website uses frames the HTML files within each frame will be recorded separately as a hit. This means if you have two frames on any one page two hits will be recorded and reported by your log analysis program.

If you mistake hits for impressions you will inadvertently deceive yourself regarding how many visitors your site really is receiving. You might decide to ease off on your website promotional efforts when in reality you should be working as hard as ever. For many successful businesses toady their website plays a central role as a strategic solution to their major business issues. If they do not get the traffic they need because they have relaxed their traffic driving promotions as a result of misunderstanding the meaning behind the term “hit” then they will be costing themselves money and missing opportunities to expand their business.

Every time a visitor to your site views one of your HTML pages an impression occurs. In the case of sites that utilize frames only the impressions on content pages are of any relevance.

This term describes the pages from which each visitor to your website come. A referrer is a page which has a link to your website somewhere on it and is a way by which people on the internet can find your website. Referrers often include search engines.

This statistic is of great importance because it allows you to measure the success of your traffic driving promotions (please see our informative article - 7 Steps to Getting all the Traffic Your Website Needs - for more information on how to drive traffic to your site) which will allow you to discard the ones that are not effective and concentrate on those that are.

For example if that banner ad for your website which you are paying another website owner to put up on their site is not getting the results worthy of the cost you could discontinue it and place your banner up on a different website where you will meet with greater success and attract a far larger amount of traffic.

This is usually the type of browser (such as Internet Explorer) being used by your visitors. Knowing the different types of browsers being used by your visitors can be vitally important and again save you money. If a visitor, as a prospective client or customer, can not view your website the way it was intended to be seen due to the type of web browser then that visitor will most likely click away from your site and not come back.

It is becoming increasingly important to spend time thoroughly testing for any accessibility issues in the design or code of a website so that it will be accessible to as many people on the web as possible. Otherwise you may be losing valuable prospective clients or losing current clients who tried to use your online services and failed.

Other user agents include search engine spiders such as Google’s Bot and PHP scripts. This is very helpful as it will tell you when each search engine last crawled your page. An important tool when it comes to successful Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and website marketing.