Page Impressions Vs Webalizer Data

Why are Hits Far Greater than Page Impressions?

[sweethilit]

Hello all,

What exactly is page impressions in terms of web statistics?
I red somewhere that the number of impressions is the number of times that Google's script is called.
If this is true, then for my understanding the number of page impressions should be equal to the number of hits.
Yet I see that the number of page impressions is about 1/5 of the hits number.

So what is this number?

[martinibuster]

Hits are simply requests made to the server. A hit could be a link to a graphic. Visits are actual web pages served to a visitor, which may be closer to what you really want to be looking at. However, it doesn't count the same visitor twice outside of a specified time period, like around half an hour. Only when that same visitor revisits after a half hour will it be counted as a new visit.

Going back to your hits data, the difference is that AdSense is counting something different than what Hits is counting.

[Jean]

Depending on your design, viewing one page on your site could involve viewing a great number of files (graphics, linked style sheets, linked javascripts etc.), therefore creating many hits per page view.
On the other hand, if your page is plain html with no graphics and linked files at all you could get 1 hit = 1 page view.
Nowadays such simple pages are almost non-existent.

[OptiRex]

If you are comparing Webalizer pages (WP) to Adsense Page Impressions (AP) then depending on your volume of traffic you could show up to 3X the difference purely because of bots and "rogue" traffic.

Some of my less used sites, when I used Webalizer, used to be around 75WP/25AP whereas higher traffic sites would be much closer to parity.

I have found Awstats to be much more in-line with Adsense if you have the option.

[sweethilit]

Thanks Four the answer. I though that hits means viewing a page, apparently I was wrong...

[joeking]

You're not alone sweethilt - I was trying to sell advertising space this week and reeled off unique visitor numbers. The potential advertiser said yes, but how many hits - a figure he felt was important, when today it is little relevance because of more complex page construction.