You may have already clicked on the little square, multi-colored image at the bottom of your page, just below the Blogger icon. If so, you'll notice that it gives you quite a bit of information about visitors to your site.
I'm going to give you a little info first and then a mini-tutorial on what to do with it later. You can just scroll down to the
important part now if you want to skip the info.
There are two links about "Recent Visitors" (uppler left) that I refer to whenever I check my Site Meter account: "referrals" and "details" They'll tell you how people are finding your site, and how long they're staying once they come. Well, the latter is not exactly true. If they only visit one page of your site, Site Meter can't tell how long they've stayed. So, you will see lots of "0:00" in the Visit Length column on your details page.
What I like about Site Meter is that it records visits, not "hits." Confused? Isn't a site visit a "hit"? Well yes, a site visit is an instance of a hit, but so are other things:
In search terminology, every listing a search engine returns from a search is called a hit. The term hit is also used to refer to calls on a web server, and it is much misunderstood. Technically, if a web page is called by a remote browser, and it includes three graphics, there are four hits on that server, one for the page, and one for each graphic. Many people and most 'hit counters' use the term hit to mean hits on the web page only, not the calls to graphics or other supporting files that come with the page. When someone quotes figures on hits, be aware that definitions and uses vary, and try to find out what definition was used in producing the figures.
("H" from Walt's Internet Dictionary)
When a web site gives you information about how many "hits" it's had, that's really not useful information. Information about "visits" is another matter.
Here's information about visits and unique visits from a page that explains it all to you:
Visit A Visit occurs when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.
Unique Visit A Unique Visit is the most important metric when assessing a website's reach. Considered together, Unique Visits and Visits ... tell the story of a website's success or failure.
(Site Metrics)
Now the last bit assumes that your sites success depends on how many visitors you get. We could argue with that.
But here's the important part.
Every time you visit your own site, within a given period of time as explained above, your Site Meter records your visit. DO you really want that? If you're like me, you don't. So...
1. Click on the Site Meter button at the bottom of your web page.
2. Click on the Login link in the green row near the top of the page, and log in.
3. At the new page, click on the Manager link (in the green row near the top of the page).
4. In the left-hand column, choose the "Ignore Visits" lin,.
5. Click on the "Ignore my current IP" button on that page.
6. You may have to do this every month or so, because most Internet Service providers assign temporary IP addresses to your computer. Don't worry about it, but if you start seeing the same IP over and over again on your Site Meter, it's probably yours and you might want to do another "Ignore Visit."
Hope this is useful!