The first paragraph of this article provides a brief overview of the topic. It discusses the common misconception about website hits and the importance of understanding the difference between hits and unique visitors. It also highlights the need for reliable web analytics tools to accurately measure website traffic.
Do you utilize a hosting service that offers statistics for your website? Have you noticed an impressively high number of "hits" on your site? Many people mistakenly believe that the number of "hits" indicates the number of visitors to their site. However, this is not the case. The accurate figure to look for would be the number of unique visitors or unique sites. For instance, even if a single person visited your site four times and viewed ten of your pages, they would still be counted as "1" unique visitor.
What should you do if your hosting service doesn't provide statistics for "unique visitors"? According to Jim Wilson, the owner of one of the most resourceful sites on the web, JimTools, your "best bet is page views when dealing with your server logs." Another alternative is to use a service like WebTrends Live which does a commendable job of calculating total visitors and first-time visitors. Jim has written an insightful article on web traffic which can be found on JimWorld.
Every time someone views a page on your site, each page, each document they could download on that page, and each graphic on that page contributes to the "hits" for that page. For example, one page with four pictures equates to five hits.
Every time someone views a page on your site, the visit is also recorded in "page views". For instance, one page with four pictures is equal to one page view.
Every time someone views a page on your site, during a 24-hour period, the page is logged as a unique URL. For example, one visitor viewing one page with four graphics would be counted as four.
This is the number of unique visitors to your site. For example, each visitor to your site during a one-month period is counted as "1" unique site, regardless of how many times they visited your site.
To illustrate how these numbers can vary, here are some statistics from my site in September 2001:
| Metric | Count | | ----------- | ----------- | | Hits | 77,158 | | Page Views | 10,855 | | Unique URLs | 548 | | Unique Sites | 5347 |
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