Visitor Sessions vs. Page Views

Should sessions be more compared to Page Views

[joinhandsday]

I'm using the DeepMetrix Livestats 6.2, and each month my "Visitor Sessions" always outnumber my "Page Views". For example, in March 2003, my site Visitor Sessions were 16,000, while my page views were 10,000. Shouldn't the #'s be reversed? Can someone explain to me how this can be happening? I tried contacting my ISP, but they are clueless. Thanks.

[Receptional Andy]

I haven't found LiveStats to be particularly good at tracking sessions.

Potentially what is going wrong here is that it cannot track visits from proxy servers corrctly. So if (for example) an AOL users visits your site, they often use a different IP to request each image etc. and page. LiveStats counts visitors based on IP address, but page views based on hits to html/php/asp files, but not images an other files (like external script files). Because each proxy visit can involve 10s of different IPs for each visit, this would distort the counts for visitors.

I'm guessing if you get LiveStats to give you a report on visitors actually IPs/hostnames you will see lots of entries for things like pol.co.uk, which are in fact the same hits by a single visitor that have been confused with uniques.

(Welcome to webmasterworld joinhandsday :))

[cfx211]

Take a look at this forum: [webmasterworld.com...]

Some possible reasons are in there. If it is not an AOL proxy issue it could be one of these reasons: you are not setting your cookie until deep into your site or someone is deeplinking into your images and those sessions are seeing your images displayed on someone elses pages.