Site stats: hits versus visits

14 Jan 2008 | Angie H

If you've ever looked at your website's statistics you know that there's a lot of information to take in and digest. And not everything is obvious. That's the case when people look at visitor statistics. You might open up your stats software and see 9000 hits and think, "Wow! My site is rocking but where are the sales?" Then you look over at your visits and see 1000 and you might end up confused. So what are hits, and what are visits? What in the world is the difference? And what should you be looking at? Read on...

Hits

When a webpage is loaded in your web browser, your computer is making a request to that site's web server. And that page might contain more than just itself – it contains images, scripts, forms, etc. Pulling up a web page is essentially the same as requesting all those items. And all those requests are hits. For example, a web page may contain 5 images and some text. Counting the page itself, pulling up that page equals (at minimum) 6 hits. That's why the hits number is almost always higher than the visits. So, the hits you see in your stats are really the total number of requests to the web server. Because of this, hits are not a reliable way to measure your site's traffic.

Visits

A visit, on the other hand, is a series of hits that are deemed to have come from the same browser within a certain amount of time. In plain English, it's a browser that came to a site or single web page for a while and then left. Within this, stats can measure whether the visit was unique or not. (That's determined by a few factors that are beyond the scope of this article.) This is really what you should be looking at when you're looking at your web stats.

That's really all there is to it, though it's an often misunderstood area of website analytics. It's important information to have, know and understand, primarily because it will help you see and analyze your site's performance better. But just as important, it's good to know for the next time a sales guy for some paid directory tells you his site is getting 10,000 hits a month. That doesn't mean anything. It's the visits that count. Otherwise that online advertising you're doing may just be a huge waste of money.

Marketing

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