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Hits versus Visitors
Eviser can provide a monthly statistics report regarding your website. We use several packages to gain this information which ensure that the customer receives the stats that they require. We use the same packages and give you the same information monthly to make it easier for you to compare the results month-to-month.
There are several terms used, and they tend to be little understood (especially hits).
Hits
Hits are one of the most misunderstood of all the web based statistics available, so we’ll attempt to clear this up a little.
Hit - A request to a web server from a web browser or other client (e.g. a robot).
This statistic is generally used by people who wish to ‘bulk-up’ the stats to Managers or Advertisers. Other than this, I don’t believe that hits offer any useful information.
A good example of what the hits stats mean is as follows;
If you have a page with 5 pictures on it, then when someone looks at that page you will have 6 hits. 1 hit for the HTML file (the page) and 5 for each request to the server for the pictures. Therefore you may only have 10 people look at a page in a day, but your stats will say 60 hits! The figures can be even higher, if for example you have an online store with 30 products on a page, each of those products has a picture, then that one person will generate 31 hits every time they visit that page!
Using the above example;
If one person was to visit just a single page on your site everyday for a month, you would have 180 hits.
Visits
This lets you know how many times your site has been visited, it's not the most accurate indication of popularity of your website, as one person could visit your site more than once, but still useful. This is gathered by the statistic program from the user’s IP address. Statistics programe generally only record these visits if they are half an hour or longer between page visits, if the same person visits the same page 10 time in under half an hour, they'll still be registered as only one visit.
If one person was to visit your site twice everyday for a month, you would have 60 visits.
This is an example of a statistics program we use
Unique Visitors
This is the statistic you should be paying the most attention to as it's a pretty accurate representation of how many people visit your site, although different stat programs record things differently and also companies like AOL are changing the way they send information to stop competitors getting information on what people search for through them. The stats program records the visitor’s IP address and only marks them as a visit once during a set period (usually 24 hours).
If one person was to visit your site ten times a day, everyday for a month, you would have 30/31 unique visitors.
Page Views
This tells you how many times your pages are loaded up. Used with alongside the other stats, such as visits, you can get a rough idea how many pages people are viewing.
For example, if you have 20,000 page views and 5,000 visits then, on average, people are looking at 4 pages at a time. (If the result of this equation equals one page or below and your site needs help! Contact us immediately).
Conclusion
This is obviously just a basic review and used to try to help our customers when reviewing their reports. And also, different statistic programs offer slightly different ways of recording the data.
If you require more in-depth information regarding your specific statistic report, then please email me and I’ll try to answer your questions as soon as possible.
If you wish to comment on this article, then please don't hesitate to contact me at markcampbell@eviser.co.uk.
