Member Avatar for n2ads

can someone tell me what the difference is between: unique visitors, number of visits, pages, and hits.

it is displayed on my monthly stats page, and I don't know what is what.
thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by hockmasm

Dani AI

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Short, practical cheat-sheet for that builds on the links posted and the follow-up from . Monthly stats panels mix several different counts; each answers a different question: “How many different people saw the site?”, “How many sessions happened?”, “How many pages were loaded?” and “How many server requests were made?”

Unique visitors (sometimes shown as "unique users")

  • Counts distinct visitors during the reporting period, normally via a persistent cookie or a login ID. The same person on two different devices or after clearing cookies will usually be counted more than once. Useful as a reach metric, but imperfect.

Number of visits (sessions)

  • Counts separate browsing sessions. A single unique visitor can create many visits. Sessions typically end after an inactivity timeout (commonly 30 minutes), at midnight, or when campaign/source rules force a new session (behavior varies by analytics tool). Use sessions to measure traffic volume and session-based engagement.

Pages (pageviews) and related page metrics

  • A pageview is recorded each time a page is loaded or tracked. "Unique pageviews" (if shown) deduplicate repeated views of the same page within one session. "Pages per visit" is an average that shows depth of interaction.

Hits

  • A hit is any request to the server (HTML page, images, CSS, JS). One page can generate many hits. Hits reflect server load, not human engagement, and are misleading for comparing audience size.

Quick checks when numbers look odd

  • Verify the analytics snippet is present exactly once on every page; look for double-tagging or missing pages. Compare analytics reports to raw server logs to spot bot traffic or missed tracking. Filter internal IPs and known bots. Remember metric labels differ between packages, so confirm vendor definitions before comparing reports.
Member Avatar for timezone

Not to put you off to another website, but these two are really good and will answer your questions. If you have further questions after looking at the definitions, please come back and post them.

Advertising Metrics Category at Marketing Terms.com

Urchin (google) Glossary
http://help.urchin.com/index.cgi?cmd=gloss

Member Avatar for hockmasm

good sites. i didn't know either.

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