When you are running a website, statistics can actually be helpful, so long as you know how to get the best out of them.

Your web site hosting company should provide you with statistics reports for your site via the Control Panel, the software available in a browser to help you configure your site.

The first statistic to look out for is “page impressions” or “page hits”. This is the number of times that pages on your site have been viewed by any user over a given period, and is a simple gauge of user activity.

However, a high number of page impressions could be misleading as you don’t know whether this is made up of a few users browsing the site many times, or many users browsing the site less frequently, or a combination of those activities.

To get a complete view of the site’s performance, also look at the Unique User count: i.e. the number of individual site visitors over a given period. Indeed, in late 2006 “unique users” overtook “page impressions” as the preferred compulsory metric for one influential website auditing company.

Here at CWCS Managed Hosting, as a web hosting company that’s been in business for over a decade, and with stellar 24/7 technical support by phone or email, we are always happy to give guidance on getting the best out of your website statistics.