Your website statistics (also referred to as metrics) can help you see how many visitors come to your site, what pages they view, how long they remain at your site, and where they came from. Web metrics will also show what search engines and keywords were used to find your site.

Here are a few of the basic terms you will need to understand:

1. Hits - This is a frequently used but less meaningful number than some of the other measurements. A "hit" is any time a file or image on your website is read or "hit." If your home page is comprised of 1 HTML file, 9 images, 2 CSS files and a Flash file, when a visitor comes to your site it will register as 13 "hits."
2. Files - This is also not an important number. It refers to the number of files that were opened, and is usually a smaller number than "hits."
3. Pages - This is a more relevant number, as it indicates the number of pages that were visited on your site. A higher number of pages viewed for a given number of visitors means that people were more engaged by your site and looked at more pages. If you are serving ads on your site, the more pages that are viewed the more ad impressions you deliver.
4. Visits - This is an important number, as it shows the number of times someone has come to your site. This is not a unique number, so one person coming to your site twice a day for an entire month would result in 60 visits.
5. Unique Visits - this is also an important number. It shows the number of unique visitors to your site. Whether a visit is unique or not is determined by the IP address of the visiting computer, so one person visiting your site from two different computers will count as two unique visitors.
6. Sites - This metric attempts to show where visitors to your site came from. If a visitor came to your site by entering your URL directly into their browser, their IP address will usually be shown. If a visitor came to your site by looking you up on Google or Yahoo, you will often see an indication of that in the address that is displayed.