Difference between Website "Hits" and Website "Visits"

[MHUK]

Hi

This is a relatively small question but what is the difference between website "hits" and website "visits"? The amount of hits my website receives is at least 50 times more than the number of visits! I do understand the difference between unique visits and general visits - one person may visit a website several number of times and this is referred to as a "visit". Whereas the number of "unique visits" would only be one, as it is only one person who has actually visited the site. However what does "hits" refer to?

Thank you for any insight and help into this definition.

MHUK

 

[deecee]

this might be a bit difficult but ill pass on what i had once heard from a network traffic guy a while ago.

A visit is when a user visits your site (not unique) so if i go to your site 5 times a day thats 5 visits.

A hit is when i visit your site and only view your index page per say. Now your index page has 5 images, an external js file and a css file. That would be 7 hits.

So pretty much a hit is each bit of info that is extracted from a server.

This is what i understand the difference to be.

Listen All I ask is that You close out a Post You Started!!!!

 

[bikh]

As far as I know, a hit is anyone that gets to your site. They could just be there for one second, it doesn't matter, that is counted as a hit.
Whereas a visit, is someone that got to your site and stayed there for a period of time.
Visits are always less than hits.
Visits are regarded as people that actually read through your site, or went around from one page to another. Whereas a hit could be that or someone that saw you site accidentally and left without looking through your site.

 

[ecobb]

deecee is right, hits are listings of everything that was pulled off of the server for a particular page. So, 1 page that was viewed 1 time could receive many hits. Visits are how many times a page has been viewed, regardless of the content on the page (images, .js files, etc...)

So, one page visit could create twenty page hits.



Hope This Helps!

Ecobb

"Alright Brain, you don't like me, and I don't like you. But lets just do this, and I can get back to killing you with beer." - Homer Simpson

 

[GUJUm0deL]

We had the same issue at work, no one can say exactly what the difference b/w a "hit" and a "visit" was.

Our Web Trends specialist said a "view" (same as "hit&quot is when a user comes to the site and views a specific page, and a "visit" is when a user comes to the site. That didn't clear anything up at all, so I was left doing some research on my own.

I found out that a "view" is non-unique hit, that's when the server pulls up the page requested, while a "visit" is a unique hit.

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[deecee]

not really

unique visits vs. just visits are two seperate things in my book

when sites advertise over 1 million hits that could very well equate to 1000 unique visitors a month. servers keep track of all files accessed, pages accessed, and who accessed them, unique or not all visits will be logged everytime a new browser session is started.

if i am incorrect please correct me -- as this is how i explain it to my superiors

Listen All I ask is that You close out a Post You Started!!!!

 

[ChrisHirst]

A hit is just a connection to the server, no distinction is made between html pages, js, css, images etc.
A page read is each time a page is accessed, this will include page refreshes as well.
A view is each page accessed from a unique IP resulting in many hits.
And a visit should be a unique IP connecting to the domain, which may result in one or many views.




Chris.

Indifference will be the downfall of mankind, but who cares?