Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits Demystified
This article is an introductory level and the intention of this article is to clarify few terms that you constantly hear in Web Analytics. Why am I writing this article? I hear some confusion about these terms from people new to field, so I thought I will write this blog post to clarify some of the common terms. I am going to explain, Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits in this blog post. Hits Back in the early Internet days, Hits was a term commonly used to measure websites traffic. This term was mainly used by IT folks, early users of web analytics tools, to get an idea of the load on the server. As Web Analytics has moved into marketing and we have move to JavaScript based solutions, this term does not hold much meaning today as terms such as Page Views, Visits and Visitors have taken over. So what is a Hit anyway? Let’s take an example of a simple web page shown below This page is an html file with one image embedded in it. When a person browses to this page (in her internet b...