Most services track unique visitors - i.e., each i.p. address that requests a page or file from your site. So, if I have a static i.p. address and visit your site 10 times in a day, I count as I visitor. On the flip side, if I have a dail up and get a new i.p. address every time I dial in, I count as 10 visitors. And if me and 10 of my friends are sitting behind a router, sharing an i.p. address, we all count as one visitor.
To further complicate it, some ISP's and corporate networks cache sites - so if people request your site enough from one location it gets copied onto their server for a while. I don't know how those visitors would count. My old webhost tracked the addresses of all visitors, and I would see a few entries for the AOL cache, for example. I don't know what relationship existed between the number of hits to the cache and the number of unique visitors (i.e.0
The visitor stat can be counted for a different time periods. So, you can have unique visitors per day, visitors per month, etc.
A pageview is when some one looks at an HTML page.
A fileview is when someone looks at a non-html file. For example, you can identify hot-linkers (people who are linking to your images, but not to your page) by looking for users with high fileviews and no pageviews.
A hit is any request of the server, including all files. So if you use little gif arrows etc, a background graphic, whatever - all those are pulled into the page when it is requested, and the requests for all those files plus your the pageview counts as a hit. But a hit is _any_ request - so even a request for a file that is not there is a hit.
To be honest, hit stats seems pretty odd to me. I will sometimes find a webpage with thousands of hits in my logs, but no pageviews or fileviews. When I visit the referring page, there is no link to my site at all. So I can't figure where the hit's come from.
HTH -
MCC
At 01:53 AM 4/21/2004 +1000, you wrote:
Since I have been with this new web host, I have a full range of statistics for my website at my disposal.
I am a little perplexed however. It says that I am averaging around 40 "visitors" per day, "370 "pageviews" per day, "145 unique page views per day, but that I am receiving about 2300 "hits". I always thought that "hits" was the amount of people that clicked through to my website? Can anyone explain what the differences between "hits", "page views" and "visitors" are for me? Or how they are measured? It appeas that I have around 700kb transferred on average per day, does this indicate "bandwidth"?
TIA, sorry if I sound too confusing! lol. I must be feeling a little DISCOMBOBULATED here... hehe.
tan.
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Mark Cassino Photography
Kalamazoo, MI
http://www.markcassino.com
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