A HitBox screen, giving real time stats on site traffic, is never far away when you are a Web Editor. Screen after screen of different views of time-stamped data from the Visual Science software. The numbers it provides are many and various, but the biggest battle is seeing the wood for the trees.
Over and above the usual page impressions, visits and daily, weekly and monthly uniques, it can, for example, break down visitors by their geographic location, even on a city basis. You could, if so motivated, find out how many people from Moscow visited the site between 26 September and 30 September. (The answer is 4, btw).
You can, if so minded, check which service providers delivered the traffic. For example, Verizon in the States delivered 64 visitors over the same period (there were over 3,400 different Internet Service Providers recognised at that time).
You could even, if you had the time, analyse the number of inbound links on a continental basis. South America, say, provided 21 traffic-generaing inbound links to EW.com in that five day spell...
Like I say, numbers, numbers everywhere, sliced and diced in almost every possible way. The one thing it certainly can't do, however, is the one thing all web professionals really want to know: What was a reader wanting to see when they visited that page?
Back to reading the runes, with just a little help from HitBox...
hitbox stats
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