Santa Clara University

How to use the statistics site

Track the number of hits to your Web pages

The statistics Web site (cms.scu.edu/webpublishing/statistics) tracks hits to all Web pages that receive more than 20 hits per day, week, month, or year on the www.scu.edu server. It is a good idea to track the number of hits to your site’s homepage or to any other important pages in your site. This will help in knowing whether or not your site is being visited.

How to use the data

In the statistics Web site, you can track hits by day, week, month, or year.

The next step you will need to take is to decide which type of report you want to look at. The site has a variety of reports, but the most useful in tracking hits are the request report, the referrer report, and the directory report.

Request Report: this report tracks the number of times a specific page in your Web site is visited. It is not able to track distinct users, so the information you receive is a total number of hits to a specific page. You are also not able to find out whether or not the visitor got to the page in error, or went deeper into your site looking for information.

Referrer Report: this report tracks the number of hits from a specific page (the one listed in the report) to any other page within the SCU Web site. In other words, a visitor to the specified page clicked on one of the links on that page to go deeper into your Web site. This is valuable data because it hopefully shows users are not coming across your site on accident, they are actually going deeper into the site. In technical terms, one SCU Web page is referring on to anther SCU Web page.

Directory Report: this report tracks the total number of hits to your entire Web site. It adds together the hits to all of the pages within your site to give you a complete view of activity on your site. The total number is listed first, followed by a breakdown of the pages and subsites.

Important Note: as stand alone numbers, none of the above are very useful in measuring the effectiveness of your site. The true benefit comes from comparing the numbers on a weekly, monthly, or yearly basis and analyzing how the numbers have changed over time.

Helpful Tip: In can be quite tedious to scroll though the statistics site in search of your Web pages. To make this step easier, use the ‘Find (on this page)’ tool which can be found under ‘Edit’ in to the main toolbar. Type in the last part of your site’s URL and then select ‘Find Next’. (Example: for the site www.scu.edu/ocm, you should simply type /ocm into the ‘Find What:’ bar. For a specific page, you would want to add the URL extension of that specific page: /ocm/contact). Once you find the specific page, you need to confirm which report the ‘find’ has taken you to. You can do this by scrolling up to the top of the specific report, or by simply remembering what each report looks like.

Below is a sample of how each report looks (you can use this as a reference):

Sample Request Report:

75045: 4.82%: 31/Oct/04 23:58: /law/img/homepage_hightech_2.swf

48795: 0.85%: 31/Oct/04 23:56: /sitesearch/

41076: 0.58%: 31/Oct/04 23:54: /ecampus/

Sample Referrer Report:

32587: http://www.scu.edu/sitesearch/index.cfm

26364: http://www.scu.edu/law/

26198: http://search.yahoo.com/search

Sample Directory Report:

15804: 0.52%: 0.72%: /scm/

7148: 0.24%: 0.13%: /scm/fall2004/

2008: 0.07%: 0.03%: /scm/exclusives/

Note: As of September 2007, Google Analytics is the preferred method for collecting statistics for traffic and we've made available a short tutorial explaining how to get started with GA.