What do the various dashboard analytics stats mean?

[kevin.redx]

Probably a dumb question....but I can't find a definitive answer. What exactly do the number in the analytics actually represent?
I have:
Page Views
Page Views Registered
Page Views Guest
Page Views Bot
Unique Visitors
But what exactly is being represented by each category? I thought I understood them but maybe someone can explain for me.

[julian]

I'm assuming you're referring to the chart in the main admin control panel?

The two main analytics tracked are pageviews and unique visitors.

• Page views are fairly self-explanatory, one page load or transition to a new page counts as a new page view.
• Unique visitors is based on the IP address, and so every time a new IP address shows up in that hour, the count is incremented by one. We also track unique visitors on a daily, weekly, monthly, and all-time basis, for the numbers here:
  • 
• The "registered", "guest", and "bot" variants for pageviews increment alongside each pageview, but depending on whether the user is logged in (or not), or whether that request came from a bot.
  • "registered" and "guest" should add up to the total pageviews, since you're either registered or not.
  • "bots" are usually also guests, but we use some basic logic to detect whether they're a bot or not (probably user-agent string)
  • For a variety of reasons, the "bot" count is not always predictable, since some bots are rather obscure, or fudge their user-agent strings, so take this number with a grain of salt.

I hope that answers your questions, let me know if there's anything else you'd like to know.