Need help with terms (i promise this is the last question for today!)

[Natalie79]

I was reading the statistics provided by my site’s host, concerning visitors. There were tables and tables of numbers and odd terms… most of which I couldn’t tell what are the differences between each… unfortunately the online help doesn’t provide a detailed glossary. Could someone help me understand a couple of them? Some are:

-Unique visitors
-Number of visits
-Pages
-Hits

(To me all the above seem the same! What’s the diff between unique visits, number of visits… what do they mean by pages… *sigh* my questions will never end =) )

[ronaldb66]

First of all: there's no limit to the number of questions you'd like to ask, as long as they're separate questions about different subjects, so go right ahead! :thumbsup:

Then, the terms: as far as I know:

"Unique visitors" means the actual number of people that visited the site over a certain period of time. One person can request may pages, so this figure not only tells you something about how many visitors used your site, but--in relation to page requests--tell you something about how long they stayed.
"Number of visits" most likely counts the times any unique visitor spend requesting pages within a certain time limit (a "unique visit"). Of course, one and the same visitor can visit the site more then once over said time period.
"Pages" is the number of actual page requests.
"Hits" usually means the sum of all file requests, so pages, style sheets, images, includes, etc. Therefore, this number actually doesn't say a whole lot about the site's traffic, and it doesn't always mean the same either. If the Hits/Pages ratio is very high, though, you might want to consider rethinking the design.


I hope that helped!

[Natalie79]

I hope that helped!

Yes it did, thank you very much! :D

-Nat