OK, so I've been doing some seo work for a client and we were reviewing her site stats. I felt a little stupid when the question arose of "Whats teh difference between hits, visits and pages?" here is the information we were looking at:

Total Hits     32315
Total Files     22909
Total Pages     5852
Total Visits     358
Total KBytes     801071
Total Unique Sites     359
Total Unique URLs     543
Total Unique Referrers     198
Total Unique Usernames     1
Total Unique User Agents

Can someone explain this to me? That is a monthyl statistic report for March (so far)

a visit is one person coming to your site and viewing 1-n pages and then leaving

a page is obviously a page

a hit is a request to your webserver - could be a page, an image, a CSS file, your robots.txt file, or even a 404 ( most stats packages toss out the errors though )

Hits are misleading cause a single page view likely has many hits - the CSS files if any ( 1 hit if its not in the browser cache ), any external javascripts ( again 1 hit if not in the cache ), a hit for each new image, etc...

the important things to look at are unique visits... aka different people from different ip's checking out your site... not mixed with bots and crawlers etc. Then when it comes to pages views its nice to see how long people spent staring at pages, and how many pages a visitor went through before leaving.

Just tell your client that those are the things to keep an eye on and the other stuff is useless info (for her - not you).

Just found this jewel of a page. It explains web logs very clearly, and how to read them.

http://www.si.umich.edu/Classes/540/Rea … alysis.htm

I think "Total Pages" is equal to "Total Pageviews".

A log entry will generate a "Hit" on the web server. For example, if a web page contains 5 images, a visit on that page will generate 6 "Hits" on the web server, one hit for the web page( it is one pageview), 5 hits for the images.

A unique user is determined by the IP address. By default, a visit session is terminated when a user falls on inactive state for more than 30 minutes. So a unique user may visit your web site twice and get reported as two visits.

If the visitor left the web site and came back 30 minutes later, analyzer will report 2 visits. If the visitor came back within 30 minutes, analyzer will still report 1 visit.