Always good to get a refresher when it comes to the correct definition of key words such as hit, page view, unique user, visitor etc.:

1. A hit is any file on the server that is requested in the browser. This value is mostly useless to track a site’s success because it also includes image files, CSS files and so on.

2. A page view groups all hits into a single request, and is thus a much more useful value. Its basic meaning is mostly “someone (or something, if you include bots) requested an HTML page”. (There is already some ambiguity with this term; e.g. do you include RSS as a page view? What about Ajax or Flash applications, which usually don’t reload the HTML but just request e.g. an XML file from the server?)

3. A visit on the other hand groups all page views of a session into a single request. Usually, a time frame of half an hour of inactivity is used to “time out” a session, meaning if the same IP would visit in the morning and the evening but not in-between, it counts as two visits (also sometimes called “unique visits”, even though it’s potentially the same person). However, the methodology starts to strongly vary with this term “visit.” My server provider 1and1, for instance, calls this session a “visitor,” not a visit, in their stats interface*. Google Analytics on the other hand never calls it a visitor.

It’s a bit like asking “how many cars drove through this street today?”. You can just add 1 for each car you see passing by. But you can also exclude cars you’ve already seen, in case someone is driving back home after work on the same day, passing the same street.

4. A visitor is supposed to group all visits into a single count over a specific time frame. As mentioned above, there is confusion between the two terms. That’s why Google Analytics uses the word “Absolute Unique Visitor” to not have it be confused with the “visitor” value of certain other packages, as the absolute unique visitor is much lower.

As an example, say your site gets 10,000 visitors everyday, and they all loyally visit once a day for 5 minutes. In a month of 30 days, you would have 300,000 visits. According to some statistics packages, you would also have 300,000 “visitors,” though that is a slightly imprecise interpretation. According to Google Analytics however (aforementioned bug excluded!), you would have 10,000 absolute unique visitors in that month… because Google is sending out a cookie to know who’s been on the site before in that month. But many statistics packages working straight from the log files do not have the luxury of this cookie, so they need to interpret the IP. Since IPs are often handed out dynamically by providers, and some proxies summarize different users under a same IP, this value is more vague, hence the 30 minute time-out for session as a sort of middle ground.

Read more.  For more definitions on general online advertising terms, click here.

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