Hits, Visits, Total Hits in 2002

[Matt]

Whats the diffrence of visits, hits, and total hits for a site? Why is Hits
and Vists always the same number? And help would be greatly apriciated.

P.S. i tried to put this in microsoft.public.cn.frontpage newsgroup but
everything came up all kinds of odd characters and symbols
--

 

[Alex Nichol]

Whats the diffrence of visits, hits, and total hits for a site? Why is Hits
and Vists always the same number? And help would be greatly apriciated.

Measuring statistics on a site is a fraught business. A 'visit'
properly regarded might see the visitor look at several pages, following
links. I would regard a Hit as looking at a *fresh* page in that
sequence (not including going back, though as these will normally be
cached, the site will not notice anyway). But it might involve getting
a fresh *file* and a page may involve getting several files to complete
its display

But then the visitor might be using (like it or not) a proxy server, and
there hundreds of people might get at a really popular page out of only
a single download to the proxy.

Sites that have a counter on the front page are really indicating the
number of times that counter has been invoked - which might mean fresh
displays of the page, including doing back and cached proxy accesses,
depending on how the counter is written