Understanding Stats??

[Guppy]

Hi all,

Just got my first site online and i'm puzzled about what is classed
as a hit?

When someone from here refers to their site getting 50k hits per month, are they taking about visitors or page views?

What deemed as the most important? the number of visitors per month or the number of times pages have been viewed?

Many thanks,
Jon

 

[rambo6376]

If you look at a stat reporting tool such as awstats, the visitors is what you want to look at. Unique visitors of course means different visitors and not repeat visitors. So if you have 100 people come to your site, of which 50 come back, your unique visitor count would be 100 and your visitor count 150. As far as hits, someone correct me if I'm wrong(and I'm talking about awstats again), it means how many items have been loaded from your site. Each image counts as a hit. So if you have 10 images on your page and only one person visits the page the hit count is gonna show 10.

 

[bensontwenty]

I think thats basically how it works - hits used to be the big thing but nobody pays attention to it anymore - what you want is to be increasing your visitors (ie keep them coming back) but also and most importantly, increasing your uniques constantly.

 

[Guppy]

Great... thanks for that Guys!

Having visitors keep returning, wouldn't this be seen as having content that keeps those returning interested?.. after all anyone can type in an URL or visit a link, take one look around the home page and then realise that your site has nothing of interest to them.

in this case wouldn't it be better to have returning visitors and lots of hits?

Thanks,
Jon