In vogue for web site design where statistics are concerned, are keeping your numbers relatively private, and putting the focus on the quality of your site. Learn more about common web statistics terms mean, and learn how to see what they mean for your site.

A hit, for example, is generated by each object that loads on your pages and registers with a web browser. That means if you have 5 graphics on a page, each one of them will register a hit. More important is a web page view, or page view for short. That measurement tells you that the page loaded successfully in your visitors browser. If you have an informational site, it may be important to have more page views - no one wants to have a resource site that people immediately click away from, for example. Conversely, if most of your blog readers follow you by your feed, you’ll only get a page view registered for each time they access your feed, no matter how many entries they read.

In these cases, it’s even more important to count the visitors. The visitors are counted by the number of times a unique address, computer or person visits your site. Sometimes, the address that would normally determine one visitor is shared, so when visitors go by unique IP address, as they are called, it isn’t always accurate.

It may under-estimate how many visitors, in the case where an Internet Service Provider such as AOL, may use the same IP address to represent all the visitors from one particular area. It may over-estimate how many visitors are coming to your site in the case of an auto-surf program or purchased visitors that aren’t generated by re-directed expired domains or manual surf exchanges. Your web visitor log or statistics program may register thousands of visitors from thousands of IP addresses, and yet none of them view your site.

A more reliable way to measure is by a program that places cookies on a remote user’s computer to track their visit, however some visitors don’t like them as much and may block them. The Google Web Analytics program uses cookies to track visitors, and is free.

If you have visitors that you think will have a problem with cookies, add the purpose of the cookie to your site’s privacy policy. Before you use a program that includes cookies, weigh the probability that more sophisticated users will block them, or not use your site, against how valuable having that data will be in helping you server your clients better.