Analytics: hits, pageviews and visits

It used to be com­mon to track web site ‘hits’. But this is not a valu­able met­ric, and rely­ing on it could lead you astray. In this art­icle we’ll explain the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and visits.

Hits explained

A web page is made up of lots of dif­fer­ent pieces. When you watch a page load — espe­cially on a slow con­nec­tion — you’ll often be able to see this quite clearly. The page builds bit by bit: first the struc­ture, then text, then other ele­ments. Large images often take longer to load than the rest.

Each piece of the site is a sep­ar­ate file, and every request to each file gen­er­ates a new ‘hit’ on the web server. Load­ing a single page could gen­er­ate any­where from 1 to 50 (or more) hits.

Pageviews

A pageview is a much more use­ful met­ric. As the name sug­gests, it tracks the num­ber of times a page is viewed.

If your site works well, you will find users vis­it­ing mul­tiple pages. This is why, although valu­able, a pageview met­ric is not a true indic­a­tion of your web site’s traffic. A high pageview count is great, but a high vis­itor count is even better.

Vis­its

A visit is the most use­ful met­ric of all. Each num­ber of vis­its tells you the num­ber of single people spend­ing time on your site in one sitting.

For example, let’s say I visit your web site in the morn­ing, and look at 5 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents one visit, five pageviews and a large num­ber of hits. But, unless I count how many images and other assets are on the page, I’m not going to be able to eas­ily estim­ate the num­ber of hits.

Later that day, I fire up my browser and return to your site, look­ing at 3 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents a second visit, three more pageviews and again, a large num­ber of hits. My activ­ity on your site has gen­er­ated two vis­its, eight pageviews and a lot of hits.

Unique and return­ing visits

Vis­itor stat­ist­ics are split between unique vis­it­ors and return­ing visitors.

What is the dif­fer­ence? A unique vis­itor is one that has never been to your web site before. A return­ing vis­itor is someone who has come back to your site.

A high num­ber of unique vis­it­ors and a low num­ber of return­ing vis­it­ors may indic­ate that your web site’s con­tent is not enga­ging enough to keep bring­ing people back.

Con­versely, if your unique vis­it­ors’ rate is low, you might want to think about ways of bring­ing more people to your site.

The best vis­itor met­rics have high num­ber of both unique and return­ing vis­it­ors. That would tell you that you are not only draw­ing people in, but you are good at keep­ing them com­ing back.

Meas­ure it, improve it

It is good to keep an eye on each part of your web site stat­ist­ics. Whatever you can meas­ure, you can improve! Know­ing the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and vis­its is the first step towards bet­ter under­stand­ing your web site visitors.

Source - http://www.cleverstarfish.com/analytics-hits-pageviews-and-visits/