Web hits?

[kostis]

Hi

I get a web hosting report with sessions, pageviews and hits

What does a hit mean?

K

[cgrantski]

A hit is a very small event - a request for one item. That item can be an image file, or a .css file, or anything at all. If one of your pages has 5 images on it, then a view of that page will count as at least six hits - one hit for the page HTML itself, and one hit for each of the images that are called by the HTML code for that page.

Most people ignore the "hits" number.

[kostis]

Thanks for this clarification - I guess the important stat is on the session number and the pageview number

[Matt Probert]

The only important statistic is the amount of money entering the bank account <g>

Seriously, among the "general public" there is a tendency to use the term "hit" as a vague term for a visit to a web site or page view. But as has been said, technically a hit is a request to the http server for a file, any file. While a page view is a request to the http server for a page (which may be an HTML page, or dynamically generated srcript result depending upon how you have your log file analysis software set).

Bear in mind that cached requests may never reach your log files, and log file statistics are really only useful in monitoring http server activity, rather than "web site" activity.

Matt

[cgrantski]

<Bear in mind that cached requests may never reach your log files...>

Another good reason for ignoring hits.

[gregbo]

The only important statistic is the amount of money entering the bank account <g>

Actually, there is a lot of truth to this statement, and lots of money has been lost trying to equate web analytics to money.

[gregbo]

Bear in mind that cached requests may never reach your log files, and log file statistics are really only useful in monitoring http server activity, rather than "web site" activity.

The log file can be useful in determining how often you're being spidered, what pages are/aren't being fetched, etc., which has a bearing on one's placement in serps (assuming one cares about that).