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pageoneresults
Posts: 1001
From: Orange, CA USA
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Hits vs. Visitors - 4/12/2002 12:42:43
One of the many areas I'm involved with on a daily basis is the dissemination of visitor statistics to the web sites that I build and manage. We utilize a program called Web Trends to track visitor activities on our sites.
One of those most confusing areas that most clients have with the reports is when it comes to Hits vs. Visitors.
Visitor = All activity for one visitor of the site.
Hit = An action on a web site such as when a Visitor views a page or downloads a file.
Let me give you an example. Let's say that Outfront had 12,000 visitors last month. The report also showed that there were 1,120,000 hits.
What is happening is this; the Visitor (counts as 1 visit) navigated their way around various pages of Outfront all the time racking up Hits. If the page they visited had 10 files to download, i.e. graphics, includes, external .css or .js, each one of those counts as a hit.
So, one Visitor could easily rack up 100's if not 1'000's of hits depending on the amount of content on each page that they visited. If you have a page that has sliced images for a navigation element, and there are 10 images in that navigation, then that counts as 10 hits when the page is loaded.
So, next time you are talking with someone and they say their site received 2,000,000 hits for the month, find out how many Visitors they had.
Its not the Hits that count, but the actual number of Visitors. I could care less if your site had 2,000,000 Hits, I want to know how many Visitors generated those 2,000,000 hits!
P.S. The default for Web Trends is to terminate a Visit when the session is inactive for more than thirty minutes. This means that if I leave the site, and come back after thirty minutes, I count as a new Visitor. If I leave and come back before thirty minutes, I do not count as a Visitor but will continue to rack up Hits for that site.
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drussel
Posts: 119
From: None
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/7/2002 22:49:26
Hey--thanks. This whole thing of getting your site seen once it is published is by far the most difficult process I have yet encountered as a newbee. Any helpful links would be appreciated here. It's all confusing to me at this point. Thanx.
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hzarabet
Posts: 1540
From: New Milford CT USA
Status: offline
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/8/2002 11:22:28
To take this a step further, I believe PAGE VIEWS is the other important stat. As it implies is registers each page as a whole, instead of as seperate elements as HITS does.
http://www.SigningsHotline.com lists EVERY upcoming athlete autograph appearance in the US and Canada
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BexHall
Posts: 18
Joined: 4/18/2002
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/8/2002 11:53:29
All right, I have one...the stats my web host provides identifies these as "Number of Requests" and "Number of Page Requests" with the first one having the higher numbers, so I'm assuming that would be files? I've sent them an email but have yet to hear back. And referring URL reports....? Wazzupwidat? I know that I didn't hit my page or request files or whatever on a certain day when it shows a lot of activity--I was out of town, so why is my domain the referring URL? I am so trying to understand....
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DrFlexible
Posts: 1
Joined: 5/8/2002
From: Cambridge United Kingdom
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/8/2002 12:02:52
Page views is v. important, particularly if you have large websites where visitors may view specialised parts - you can link it to visitor information to find out how many pages a typical visitor will visit.
But, measuring visitors is far from easy. Many people access the web from a single machine or through a single gateway - in a company, library or other public facility. You may find that a whole day's browsing by a dozen people may count as only one visitor, as only 1 IP address is picked up in a continuous session. Designing public information sites, where certain locations have one of our websites as their most-used resource, the visitor figures we know are under-counted.
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pageoneresults
Posts: 1001
From: Orange, CA USA
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/8/2002 12:25:08
Hello BexHall, you asked...
Q: "Number of Requests" and "Number of Page Requests" with the first one having the higher numbers, so I'm assuming that would be files?
A: Your assumption would be correct
Q: And referring URL reports? Wazzupwidat? I know that I didn't hit my page or request files or whatever on a certain day when it shows a lot of activity--I was out of town, so why is my domain the referring URL?
A: Typically your own URL will be the top referring URL. What the report is telling you is that "X" number of visitors either typed your domain in directly, followed a bookmark from their favorites, or, followed a link from within your site that points to that URL, i.e. a home page link. You can filter out certain referrers and this becomes somewhat a technical issue which can be handled by the host providing stats.
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BexHall
Posts: 18
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 5/8/2002 14:53:40
Wonderful! And thank you all! Very informative.
Keep up the great work!
Bex
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winter
Posts: 175
Joined: 3/12/2002
From: Toronto ON Canada
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 7/8/2002 12:23:20
I have never really tracked stats for my site, but did install the hit counter on the home page... because I was trying to use all the features of FP.
I revise the number from time to time to delete what I think are visits that I made to the site.. to more acurately reflect how many visitors I have had.
My question is ... what is that FP 2k hit counter counting? Is it hits or visitors? If someone landed on another page of my site first.. would the hit counter still rack up another visitor? If someone visits a sub web... would the hit counter still light up one more or would I need to put a hit counter there to keep tracK?
It sounds like you would know. Thanks in advance. This has been one of the mysteries of FP for me!
_____________________________
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AcadiaGuy
Posts: 92
From: Maine, USA
Status: offline
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RE: Hits vs. Visitors - 7/9/2002 0:56:39
Hey, I hope you can help me out. 
My host uses Media House' s Statistics Server Live Stats 5.0. It breaks everything down... page views, hits, and SESSIONS. Last month, one of my sites had 5,864 sessions. Does this mean that there were about that many visitors? I ask because I also can see " Who' s On" - a list of people currently on the site. Often times, it appears that one visitor is broken up into multiple sessions if they are on AOL cause apparently different servers retrieve different files. So- because of this, would the " sessions" still show an accurate count?
I' m sorry if I sound confusing... I' m not really quite sure how to explain the AOL thing. If it helps, this is the software that ReadyHosting uses and that Half Price Hosting used to use (I dont know if they still do anymore).
Thanks for any info! 
_____________________________
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Web design: http://www.hypertext-design.com
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