Hi! I'm new and totally sub-human in the computer world. It frightens and comfuses me. So, on that note, not sure if this is the right area to ask this question. In the reports/statistics section of my website, what does it mean if someone viewed one page, but there were 10 hits? Thanks.

Those stats always confuse me too. I think what it means is that one person, tracked by IP address, viewed the page 10 times. This is common, for example, if you have a home page with links to and from several auxilary pages. They hit your page once, click to somewhere, then click the "home" link and hit the page again, and so forth.

I could be wrong about this, of course! You can always ask your web host for a precise breakdown and explanation.

The hit counter often reports the visits by bots like Google bot, Yahoo bot...

This could be often misleading as it seldom gives correct statistics.

Thanks-That kind of makes sense. I probably should call my webhosting co. and ask them to explain a few other things. I just thought there was some simple explanation and I was missing it.

The word HITS is ofte used in two contexts, either meaning amount of visits or more technically meaning every request.

When your "hits" are alarmingly larger than your "visitors" the stats probably mean every request done for every file including images.

So, if your page has 12 elements (say the HTML file itself, two CSS files, 1 JS file and 7 pictures) a normal visit would produce 12 hits for the first page view. Then, thanks to browser catching, the next page may only produce 3 hits because most of the files (CSS, JS, images) are already loaded from the previous page and do not need to be requested again.

These stats are good pointers but they can't be too exact because most of these numbers are rounded, guessed, inferred, etc. For instance, "unique visitors" is usually a list of the IPs that are not repeated, which is not a truly accurate representation of your unique visitors since IPs can be (and are) shared. Whether the script gives you the exact number of IPs that were not repeated during the period or gives you an educated guess based on known ratios, you are never going to get a solid number.

Thank you for your reply - you're a wealth of information and I'm going to bookmark your web site to learn more. This is a great forum!

Thanks for the compliment!, and we are here to help.