What's the difference between hits and page views on a website?

Question

I'm using weblog lite as an analysing tool and I don't understand the difference. The Page views data seems to correspond with the number of times the pages were viewed but I'm not sure what hits are then...

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

Yellabrick - all the above answers are just plain WRONG!

A hit is NOT the same as a page view, or the number of visits to a page and it's certainly nothing to do with a search engine.

A page view is where the page itself is viewed by a visitor - this is the most important statistic to take note of when managing a website.

A hit refers to a 'document hit' - you get a 'hit' whenever a document in your website is loaded. This includes pages, but also any images and external files within those pages.

If a page on your site has two images on it, you'll get 1 page view but 3 hits.

So unlike page views, hits are really meaningless and should be ignored for most purposes.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

I managed to find the answer myself in the meantime, and this answer is the same as what I read. Thanks!

Answer 2

Those are the same..A hit means the page has been opened.

Answer 3

the spelling?

Answer 4

Hits is the number of unique visits to the site. Page views is how many time the unique visitor has viewed the page.

So a unique visitor might make 1 hit, but view the page 10 times.

Answer 5

A hit means that a keyword leading to your site has shown up in a search done by someone, it DOES NOT mean the site was actually visited.

A page view is when someone has viewed a page in your website.

Answer 6

Its as lookforAdam says, all the others are way off the mark.

A hit is about anytime a browser requests some information from your website and a page view is when a complete page is viewed. Both are very misleading and are there for historical and adminstrator information (and because they are easily extracted from the server logs).

What you really want to know is the number of unique visitors, some log analysis data will give you this.

But again be warned this is misleading as it really refers to the number of unquie visits from browsers which does not mean unique people. Consider someone opens your site in a browser, closes it and then goes back to it two minutes later, this can be recorded as two unique visitors.

With most of this stuff look for changes in magnituted of the results to give you a feeling for how your site is going. The other and somewhat better option are to inlcude code on your site to monitor users, such as Google Analytics

Source(s):

www.google.com/analytics