Tracking website visits

[LawyerRon]

When looking at statistics relating to website traffic, what's the difference between "hits" and "Visits"? Which is more relavent, ie, more important? TIA

[mairving]

Visits = number of unique visitors to your site.
Hits = number of times each page is visited. It could be one person visits one page 100 times or 100 people visit 1 page.

[Statica]

A hit is nothing more than a request for a file. It will account for all the files that make up a single page. A visit or session is a series of requests by the same client within a specific time. It accounts for all the hits by the client before the session timeout.
Visits are by far more accurate than hits in measuring site popularity.

[mairving]

You might find this helpful as well:

Hits Any request made to the server which is logged, is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... html pages, graphic images, audio files, cgi scripts, etc... Each valid line in the server log is counted as a hit. This number represents the total number of requests that were made to the server during the specified report period. Files Some requests made to the server, require that the server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file' and the files total is incremented. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests' and 'outgoing responses'. Pages ('Pageviews') Pages are, well, pages! Generally, any HTML document, or anything that generates an HTML document, would be considered a page. This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. What actually constitutes a 'page' can vary from server to server. The default action is to treat anything with the extension '.htm', '.html' or '.cgi' as a page. This is also used with other extensions, such as '.shtml', '.php3' and '.pl'. Sites Each request made to the server comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This does not mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited, which is impossible to determine using just logs and the HTTP protocol (however, this number might be about as close as you will get). Visits Whenever a request is made to the server from a given IP address (site), the amount of time since a previous request by the address is calculated (if any). If the time difference is greater than a preconfigured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit', and this total is incremented (both for the site, and the IP address). The default timeout value is 30 minutes, so if a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, two visits would be registered. Note: in the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as the "Minimum number of visits" that came from that grouping instead. Note: Visits only occur on Page Type requests, that is, for any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the Page Type option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close "guess". KBytes The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the server during the specified reporting period. This value is generated directly from the log file. Note: Webalizer defines a kilobyte as 1024 bytes, not 1000 Top Entry and Exit Pages The Top Entry and Exit Pages give a rough estimate of what URL's are used to enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are. Because of limitations in the HTTP protocol, log rotations, etc... this number should be considered a good "rough guess" of the actual numbers, however will give a good indication of the overall trend in where users come into, and exit, your site.

[mairving]

Originally Posted by Statica A hit is nothing more than a request for a file. It will account for all the files that make up a single page. A visit or session is a series of requests by the same client within a specific time. It accounts for all the hits by the client before the session timeout. Visits are by far more accurate than hits in measuring site popularity.

Just beat Statica by a minute.

[Statica]

Mark - a visit need not be unique visitors. It could be repeat visits as well.
Most good analytics programs will distinguish and list visits and unique visitors.

[LawyerRon]

Thanks for the info!

[Statica]

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/docs/..._glossary.html has a set of commonly used web analytics terms.

[Statica]

Originally Posted by mairving Just beat Statica by a minute.

I guess we've both established our stat file preferences.. you take Webalizer as the resource, I like AWStats a lot more

[mairving]

Originally Posted by Statica I guess we've both established our stat file preferences.. you take Webalizer as the resource, I like AWStats a lot more

Actually I prefer AWStats as well although it has some problems currently in the BSD ports tree. It just that Webalizer was closer at hand.

Yep, I did goof about the visits thing. I was thinking of uniques. Been a long week already.

[faulkner132]

Originally Posted by mairving Actually I prefer AWStats as well although it has some problems currently in the BSD ports tree.

It only takes a few minutes to install it manually. I have to do this on Windows servers.

I know what you mean about ports... you really start to get spoiled by software repositories.