Some history on the misnomer "website hits". In the beginning, webmasters talked about "hits" to their website. That was in the old days, when the top Internet speed was a paltry 9600 bits per second and websites rarely carried images. Today, broadband Internet access is measured in the millions of bits per second - and hits are largely discredited as a measure of Web site traffic, since they count individual files served up. A single Web page today can account for a dozen or more hits if it has a lot of photos, style sheets or script includes, while in the days of old a text-only page would have generated just a single hit. Obviously, website hits are wrong.

These days the web-smart talk of metrics and analytics such as page views and unique visitors, not hits. Search engine "spiders" complicate the task. Their automated software robots scour the Internet and index website pages. Site operators must filter out these spiders to get an accurate count of how many real humans are visiting a site.

One of the softest web numbers is the tally of unique visitors per month. For sites that require registration and log in, it's fairly simple. But the rest must depend on other devices, ranging from analyzing server log files to using cookie identifiers. This process is neither simple nor accurate, as the sheer volume of raw log data makes any human reading impossible. Web site operators usually get information about site traffic from their own server logs, or by subscribing to a third party web site analytics service such as My Site Traffic.

Click here to view a slide-show demo. Register for a free trial web metrics account.

Know your metrics. Get accurate and real-time information on your site traffic, from page views to unique visitors to referral sources. Use these statistics in your marketing strategies. Search engine spiders are automatically excluded from analytic reports. Website hits are not even considered as a viable metric.

Know your web site traffic. Get detailed information on your visitor demographics, their physical location (city/state/country) as well as their browser and computer types. Identify the most popular pages on your website and improve the content on the least popular pages. Spot potential dead-end pages by tracking exit pages where visitors are leaving your website. Watch your visitor navigation through your website, observe the actual path they take as they click their way around your website!

Know your partners and affiliates. Track other websites who link to you and expand relationships with the top referring sites. Ensure external links are bringing visitors to appropriate pages on your website, and easily identify any external site that is sending traffic to outdated or obsolete pages.

Know your place on the search engines. Monitor traffic coming from search engines, and track the keywords and search phrases that bring visitors to your website. Identify keywords that are not drawing as much traffic to optimize your website content and improve your site's search engine visibility.

Know your ROI from advertising. A successful advertising campaign must generate a high Return On Investment. By using specific landing pages for each advertising (or keyword bidding) campaign, you can easily track results for all visitors that clicked through ads. Observe their actual path through your website, and determine if they made a purchase (or found what they were looking for).

Simple to implement. All you have to do is add a few lines of HTML code to your website pages, and your web site traffic metrics will immediately start being recorded. No need for transferring enormous webserver logs.

Simple to use. Login to the Report Manager at any time to view real-time statistics for your website, traffic reports are updated hourly. Summary reports can also be saved and emailed periodically to your mailbox in PDF format automatically for daily, weekly and monthly reports. If you have more than one website, you can attach all your sites to your reporting account to easily view and manage your reports.