Can you please tell me the difference between a hit, a page view and a visit? We can get reports from our hosting services, but don't know what they mean. -LS
The terms involved with studying site statistics (a.k.a. Web analytics), can be confusing. Therefore, I recommend that you only concern yourself with Page Views and Visits.
Here's the difference:
- Page View- Each individual Web page a visitor browses to is tracked as a single Page View.
- Visit- When a visitor arrives at your Web site, hopefully they proceed to browse one or more pages. Depending on the tracking software used, the whole experience from the time the first page is viewed to the time the visitor leaves your site -- and everything they do during that time -- can be referred to as a Visit. One individual visitor can have many visits to your site over time and is then referred to as a returning visitor. A unique visit refers to someone visiting your site for the first time.
- Hits- Each of the number of files downloaded when a visitor views a page is referred to a Hit. For example, if you had a Web page containing only 6 photos, viewing that page would generate 7 hits (6 for the photos, and one for the HTML file that contains them). A page view can contain hundreds of hits and so hits are not a reliable way to measure website traffic. This is the reason to focus on measuring page views, and not hits.
To provide an example, 1 "Visit" to a Web site might include 3 "Page Views" and a total of 21 "Hits". In addition, a site might have had 1,000 visitors within a month comprised of 100 unique visitors, each of whom visited the site 10 times.
