Re: Hits vs. Visits

> What is the difference between a hit and visit. If my guess it correct,
> a hit is just that: Someone clicks on a link to your page, scrolls
> through, then leaves. I know a hit counter records whenever the page is,
> well, hit.  But what constitutes a true "visit"?

Pam,

This may rock some people's world...... Everytime the webserver sends a file
at the request of a web browser, it constitutes a 'hit'.  Many times this
means that when a person visits just ONE webpage, several 'hits' are
recorded.  Why?  If your page contains images, each image is a file that is
transferred.  Thus each image on your page will result in a 'hit' being
recorded. For example, if you have a page with five images, six hits will be
recorded: one for the webpage itself, and five more for the images.  As Jim
Tom Polk mentioned earlier,  everytime a person visits your site, they are
doing so with a specific IP (Internet Protocol) address.  Each address is
recorded if it hasn't been seen for specified amount of time. One visit can
be responsible for many hits, even if they just view one page.  As you can
see, a site with lots of images is going to generate many more hits than one
that hardly has any.  Therefore, it is not a way to compare the traffic of
one site to another.  And those counters you always see on people's pages,
you don't know if they are counting hits or visits.  To me, visits would be
more meaningful.

Background information:
If you have a dialup connection to access the internet, an IP address is
most likely akin to the number you get when you go into a deli and pull a
number to wait to get served.  While you are there, no one else has that
number.  The next time you go, you most likely will have a different number,
but again, at that time, no one else has that number.  If you work for a
company that has a firewall,  usually the company is assigned a permanent
number and all employees will be surfing the web with that same number.  So
with all that being said, 'visits' or some call them 'sessions' cannot be us
ed to accurately determine your actual number of visitors.  They can only
give you a rough estimate, and only if you know how to interpret them.  Yet
more reasons not to put much stock in those counters you always see.  Web
page statistics can only be properly interpreted to have any real meaning by
knowledgeable people that design or maintain their site.

Hope I didn't further muddy the water,
Steven A.

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