What is the difference between visits and hits, I would have thought they were the same but I bet more hits than Visits.:confused:

Visits, are usually uinque, as you probably know, each PC/connection has an IP, a "Visit" is only 1 per IP, a HIT can be many times per IP, like if you go to google, for the first time, thats 1 visit, and 1 hit, but visit it a second time, thats 1 visit, and 2 hits..

There is a little more to it than that, but that should explain it for you enough to get it :)

Are you sure a visit isn't when someone types in the URL and a hit is when someone is referred to the site by clicking on a link?

Usually a visit is classed as a single IP that hits your page and its classed as the same visit until they have been inactive on your site for a set period of time...

Usually its 30mins, so if I visit the forum and spend 1hr going through the forums and replying etc then go away for tea come back an hour or two later then thats a new visit :)

If you want actual different people statistics you could get a counter that places a cookie on their machine which means it will only ever count them once (unless they delete their cookies)

Hits are a next to useless statistic but the word "Hits" is snappy and sounds good. Therefore it is used widely in the media all the time.

It is possible to generate several hits on one visit to a web page. Simple webcounters rely on hits, they increment when the page they are on is downloaded. However if the person browsing, loads the page again without using his/her local cache then another hit is generated.

A visit is ideally where one person visits a particular web page, but it can only be downladed by them again the next day. However there are many reasons where someone might wish to visit a web page multiple times a day, for example, to catch up with an update to a stock price or a cricket score.

Therefore in a static webpage I would define a visit as one visit per person per day.
But
on a live updated website I would say it would be better to call a visit when the person visits again after an update.

A hit is when an object is downloaded from a webserver
A pageview is when a page is viewed
A visit is a session of a set length by a certain unique IP.

It is therefore possible for a single visit to generate say 250+ hits, especially if you have a lot of images on your page.

And the statistics program your using will make a lot of difference. I find that upto 60% of traffic on some of my sites is from robots/spiders (eg google)

Thanks People I stand enlighted now.:thumbsup: :clap: