Website Hits versus Visitors
A while back, before Rosie O'Donnell left The View, I recall her talking excitedly about the celebrity gossip website Perez Hilton and exclaiming "that site gets fifty thousand hits a day - fifty thousand! (gasp)". I remember thinking, well ok, but how many visitors does it get?
Website hits are very different than website visitors. This article does a great job of describing the difference:
There seems to be some confusion regarding the terms used to describe website visitor traffic. We usually hear website owners speak in terms of "hits" to their website. Hits don't accurately describe the number of visitors viewing the website - they are actually just any sort of HTTP request made to your server. Not only are requests made for website pages, but also for all the images and other files associated with viewing a single page. Therefore, one page view could actually result in dozens of hits, and, if a single user visits many pages on your website, this visit could generate hundreds or even thousands of hits. This can excite some website owners, but this number is not a reliable indictor of how many people have actually visited the website.
The term that website owners want to focus on is the amount of unique impressions that are generated by their website. A unique impression will measure the number of actual people visiting the website based on their IP address, browser, and operating system. No matter how many "hits" a visitor registers on your website, the server will record the session as one unique visit. Thus, the number of unique visits gives us a much better idea of the amount of traffic the website is generating.
Source: Site Pro News
If you have a website for your home-based business, one thing you should be doing is looking at your website statistics periodically. Focus on visitors not on hits and see how those site visitors are doing. Are they leaving right away? Are they coming in via some other page than you home page? Analyzing your visitor statistics can tell you a lot of interesting, useful things and you can often diagnose problems by looking at visitor behavior patterns in your statistics.
Tags: Website Statistics, Website Visitors, Website Hits, Website Analytics
