Hits vs Visitors
Posted on Jan 28, 2009 by Stuart Gilbertson
If you're looking at your website statistics and wondering what the difference is between a "hit" and a "visitor", then read on!
There are literally hundreds of useful packages on the Internet today that will generate accurate statistics about people visiting your website. But what does it all mean? Well, the biggest issue we've come across is the misunderstanding between the word "hit" and the word "visitor".
The best way to explain things is to use an example. Lets take a basic web-page called "index.html". Inside index.html, we have ten <img> tags that link in images on the same web host server. Whenever someone visits index.html, they'll see ten images. Following this so far? Of course you are!
When the person views index.html, they would show up in your statistics as a hit eleven (11) times. They "hit" the index.html file, and then they "hit" each image. In fact, a "hit" isn't much use to anyone to be honest, we're really interested in what a "visit" is.
A "visit" or "visitor" is classed as one person browsing your entire website. It doesn't matter how many images are linked, or how many pages they visit in your site. If you look at your statistics and you see that today you received 50 visits and 4,500 hits, this simply means that you had 50 visitors (users) browsing your site.
Pretty simple once you know, eh?
What Our Clients Think
I've known the owner (Stuart) of Equiphase for a long time now and if only all relationships between the hosted and the hoster were as great as this..
They know their shizzle and what they offer is all at great prices...
You won't be dissapointed.
Our Latest Blog Post
We've made some changes after listening to your feedback.