Analytics

I’ve been a systems administrator for over 10 years, and doing my own websites for around the last 6-7 years. In speaking to customers over that time, one thing always appears to be misunderstood, and that is the difference in-between unique visitors, visits/visitors, pageloads and hits. It can be quite confusing trying to work them out on your own, and unless you understand what they mean, it means any metric you try to calculate for your website is going to be way off.

Ok, we’ll go thought the stats one by one, and what they mean (we’ll go in order, of how they would be generated/tracked):-

Unique Visitors

A unique visitor is an individual person who visits your website, if you use web based tracking software like Google analytics or Sitearmory, they’ll be tracked by cookies, if you use server side software like awstats, they are worked out on a best guess, they are usually tracked in the way 1 individual = 1 unique visitor, which lasts for a month. A Unique visitor can generate several visits.

Visits

Every time a unique visitor visits your website, your “visits” will go up by one; different software will have different time allocations to a visit. As an example, one piece of software would count all pages loaded in a 6 hour period as one visit, any more page loads after that would be another visit, a unique visitor will generate a new visit every time they look at your website, so they can create a lot of visits for your website over the period of a month.

Page Loads

A page load, is when a visitor loads a page, is someone visits your website’s front page, that would be 1 page load, if they visited your products page, that would be a second page load, if they then visited your contact us page, that would be a 3rd page load, so every time a visitor loads a page on your website the page load count will go up by one. Also this is a very important metric for advertising, as generally advertising companies will want to know how many page loads you are doing a day/week/month. So it’s a good idea to be able to tell somebody the average page loads you are getting a day/week/month.

Hits

A lot of people will quote hits, because they are the biggest number of the stats page. But they are misleading, every time there is a page loaded, there are support files for the page, like images (a logo would be a great example), CSS files, display files etc, one page load, might generate a lot of hits. It isn’t uncommon these days for a single page load to average over 20 hits.

Ok, so how do all these fit together? It’s quite simple, here’s an example (in one month)

1 Unique Visitor = 15 Visits = 45 Page loads = 450 hits.

As you can see the numbers add up extremely quickly, the above example would be one person visiting your Site every second day and loading 3 pages each visit.

If you have any questions, or would like something defined more, please fell free to leave a comment and ask.

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