confusion about hits and visits

[Web-rooniev]

When you check statistics of your websites and find 6000 hits and think that "My site is too much popular but where are the sales?" Then you look over at your visits and see 900 and you might end up confused. So what are hits, and what are visits?

A “hit” is a request for a single file from the web server. That’s it. It could be any file, including: html, txt, jpg, gif, pdf, js, etc.

A visit is also known as a session, starts when a user enters a site, and ends when a user exits a site. A visit consists of one or more pageviews. If someone visits a site for 10 minutes, then leaves, but returns 2 hours later, that is usually counted as 2 visits.

Difference between hits and visits?

Any request made to the server is considered a "hit". A request can be for any object, an html page, a graphic image, an audio file, a CGI script, etc. So, "hits" are the total number of requests that were received during the specified report period.

For example, a web page may contain 5 images and some text. Counting the page itself, pulling up that page equals (at minimum) 6 hits.

A "visit", on the other hand, is a series of "hits" that are deemed to have come from the same browser within a certain amount of time. A "visit", therefore, represents a browser that came to your site for a while and then left.

Each "visit" is composed of many more "hits". For example, when a browser requests one page on your site, webalizer will report 1 hit for the page request, plus 1 more hit for each image or other object (flash object, javascript file, etc) that was referenced on that page. That is why hits are always greater than visits.

Visits are also grouped by time. Webalizer does this by looking at the IP address of the browser and calculates the amount of time since a visitor's last request (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit'. The default timeout value is 30 minutes and can be changed by you. So, if a browser visits your site at 1:00PM and then returns at 3:00PM it will be reported as 2 visits.