stats--hits, pag views, visitors

how to interpret these numbers

[brdwlsh]

hi-

i uploaded a site two days ago. today i was looking at the stats and was a bit surprised/confused. these are my numbers:

total visitors: 79
total pageviews: 291
total hits: 1,126

does this mean that 79 people, unique or not, saw 291 of my pages? if so, then what does total hits mean? what is the difference between pageviews and hits?

thanks

[sem4u]

does this mean that 79 people, unique or not, saw 291 of my pages?

Yes it does.

Hits are the total number of items downloaded from the server, e.g. a HTML page is one hit and every image is another hit.

Page views are the actual number of pages visited.

[Robino]

Hits are images (and other media/files) + pages.

When someone visits a page with ten images, it registers 11 hits.

[bcolflesh]

Remember that is only an approximation - many providers are using DHCP which may assign a different address for each request, making the unique visitor count totally inaccurate - related info here:

iboost.com/manage/traffic_analysis/00103.htm

[Mardi_Gras]

>does this mean that 79 people, unique or not, saw 291 of my pages?

Sorry for the contradictory advice, but no, it doesn't. Visitor counts are notoriously unreliable.

As to hits, for visitor tracking purposes they are meaningless. Page views may give you a pretty good idea of just that - page views. Correlating that to visitors, length of stay, etc, is iffy at best.

I suggest you start reading the following threads:

[webmasterworld.com...]

[webmasterworld.com...]

At the end of that second one Claus has put together links to several more threads. This will really give you some insight into what data you can get about your visitors and how you can best get it.

[brdwlsh]

thanks for the all the info, this clears things up a bit for me.

i have a page with alot of thumbnails which no doubt bloats my hit count.

[Mardi_Gras]

>i have a page with alot of thumbnails which no doubt bloats my hit count.

Don't even look at your hit count. When considering visitor activity, it is a meaningless metric.