While much is made of hits, it is really not a very useful measure of site performance. A picture on the home page is considered a "hit". Double the number of pictures on the home page, and you double the hits! Click on any month, and you will get the detailed statistics. Most of this information is only of interest to techno geeks. The good stuff comes later.

Daily traffic information follows a very regular pattern for most sites. Traffic peaks on Monday, and trails off slowly during the week, repeating every week. Promotions and holidays can affect this trend.

Here again, hourly traffic for most sites reflect the North American time zones, and doesn't vary much. Under some circumstances (such as a war) you can see a "super-bowl flush" effect: Traffic will dip during the news hours.

A URL is geek speak for a web site address. These are the top 30 most visited pages on your web site. The links are the names of web page files, and are usually pretty cryptic. On a live stats page, you can click on a link to see what page it is. Entries that begin with /cgi/ are server side programs (such as a shopping cart), and will probably give you an error if you visit them directly.

Entry Pages are the web page where a visitor entered the site. If they entered via a bookmark or a search engine, they may not hit the home page first. The lone '/' at the top is the home page.

The Exit Page is the last page visited before the customer left the site. Note that a large number of visitors enter and leave at the home page, because they aren't where they wanted to be.

Total Sites is somewhat misleading. This is actually the Internet address of the visitor. It can be useful in subtracting your own visits to the site from the total visits, if you have a high-speed connection. Click here to see your Internet address. The entries with a '*' are grouped together. On this chart, there where 97 visits from AOL users, 372 from Time Warner's Road Runner (rr.com) and so on.

The Referrer is the web site that the visitor was on before they came to your site. Direct request means they typed in the web address and came straight to the site. This chart can tell you how many came from a search engine site (such as http://www.google.com/search ), or if there is another web site that provides a link to your site.

Search strings are the phrases that at visitor typed into a search engine to find you. In this case, hits are the number of times that the same phrase was used. This is vital information for determining how people find you.

User Agent is another name for a web browser. While it is more important for your developer, it can give you a feel for the technical sophistication of your visitors. Note that in this example, almost 7% of visitors are using a very old Netscape browser (Mozilla/4.7 is actually Netscape version 4.7). If the design of your site is too technically advanced, a visitor may not be able buy anything, or even navigate the site.

Country of origin of your visitors. Note that foreign visitors need not be foreign. English speakers reside all over the world.