Hits, Page Views, and Visits: Get Them Straight

• Posted by B Jones on November 12th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

Hits:
The term hit is probably one of the most misused terms when it comes to describing website traffic.

I’ve heard many times, something like, “My site got over 1000 hits today!”.

Well, if that person knew what a hit was, he would know that 1000 hits really isn’t impressive at all.
Simply put, a “hit” is a request for a single file from the web server. That’s it. It could be any file, including: html, txt, jpg, gif, pdf, js, etc.

For most websites, one page usually contains image, javascript, and css tags, which have a src url pointing to separate files. So when that 1 page is loaded, it could potentially result in over 100 hits or more. (or over 100 requests for other file resources)

If it were up to me, the word “hit” would be completely stricken from the web analytics/ measurement vocabulary. I would instead suggest that the word “request” be used instead.

Pageviews:
Page views are a lot easier to understand, because the 2 words “page” and “view” basically describe what it means.

A Pageview is total number of times any page is viewed. For example, if someone lands on page A, goes to page B, then back to page A, that counts as 3 pageviews because there were 3 page loads.

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Cookie Based Measurements
The following measurements are cookie based, and will vary depending on which analytics program you use.

Unique Page Views:
This is a term that I first heard from Google Analytics. It is based on a session or a single visit to a site. So unlike a normal pageview, a unique pageview only counts once per visit.

For example, if a person goes to page A, then to page B, then back to page A, that would count for 2 unique pageviews, because the person only looked at 2 pages.

Visit:
A visit is also known as a session, starts when a user enters a site, and ends when a user exits a site. A visit consists of one or more pageviews. If someone visits a site for 10 minutes, then leaves, but returns 2 hours later, that is usually counted as 2 visits. (note: 2 hours isn’t a standard, the minimum time between visits can vary depending on the analytics software)

Unique Visit:
A unique visit is like a regular visit, but each visitor is only counted once in any given time frame. So the example above would only count as 1 unique visit.

Of all the cookie based measurements, unique visits is definitely the potential to be least accurate. Though some programs use IP address as well a unique cookie in the users browser to identify them, there are still lots of scenarios where things can go wrong. Just to name a few:
- IP’s are rarely static
- visitors can switch browsers
- visitors can clear cookies
- visitors can have more than one computer accessing the web, like a school or library
- visitors use proxy switchers

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