Hits Pageviews Visits & Unique Visits
:There is some confusion as to what hits, pageviews, visits and unique visits are. At least there was in the blog I just came from.
Hits are the number of files that are accessed during a pageview and can be any where from 1 to easily 25 or more. One hit for accessing the CSS file, one hit for each JS file, one hit for each image file, one hit from each template file, and the list goes on. Hits are a useless statistic.
Pageviews are the number of times any page on your site is accessed. If you divide your pageviews by your visitors you will get the average number of pages a visitors is looking at.
Visits are the number connects that request pages from your site. One person could come and go to your site 100 times a day. If fact if you look at your visits by IP you will probley find your own IP address at the top of the list.
Uniques are unique visits and usually it means unique visits in one month not first time visitors.
What are these stats good for?
Hits are useless except to impress people that don’t know better. Pageviews tell you the number of impressions a site wide banner will get. Visits can be used to give you your conversion rate by dividing your site conversions by your site visits. This is an very important number to monitor.
Anyway that is my daily rant. I just came from a blog that posted that hits are the same as pageviews so I got inspired to post this.
