hit or miss?

As a web user, having gone through the effort of building a site for the world to view, chances are you would like to know exactly how much of the world is coming by to take a look. Many of our users have taken advantage of "hit counters", which can be installed on one's main page.

Words such as "hits", "visits", "traffic" and "pageviews" are often used interchangeably, and their distinct meanings are lost.

Terms Defined

The main point is that each time you click a link, a request is sent to the given site's server to send the page back. Once your browser receives the page, it reads it and requests all of the necessary images from the server. If the page you visit has 5 inline images, your browser makes 6 requests in total to the appropriate server; one for the page itself and then one for each of the 5 images. Each request received by the server counts as a "hit" in the purest technical sense. Strictly speaking, the site you visited could claim to have received 6 hits by your viewing of a single page of their site.

Obviously anyone advertising on websites does not really care how many "hits" the sites on which they advertise receive. They are more interested in "pageviews", or the number of times each page is visited. In our example above, only the single request for the page itself is counted. The hits requesting the images are ignored. This way, an advertiser has an idea of how many times their ad was viewed.

Site marketers may be interested in the size of the "audience" that visits the site on any given day. Pageviews are not a useful statistic here because a single person may view between 1 and 12 pages on the site, making it difficult to interpret the audience size accurately. The number the marketers crave is termed "unique visits". This statistic counts the number of different return addresses that visit a given site. My computer is called main.keens.org, so every time I visit a webpage that address appears in a log file on that site's server. When they sort the log files and see that my address requested 10 pages on their site between 1 and 1:30pm, they count that activity as a single unique visit.

Major sites take their stats even more seriously and combine figures to find out things like the average number of pages people view on a given visit, what times are busiest and so on.