Do you know your visits from your views?
There is no doubt Google Analytics can be confusing but this simple definition guide I found on tendenci.com will hopefully clarify some of the terms used. If you still need help or guidance feel free to give me a call on 086 4008087 or email allen@amw.ie and see what Google Analytic’s can do for your website.
1. Visit – This is the one piece of information that you really want to know. A visit is one individual visitor who arrives at your web site and proceeds to browse. A visit counts all visitors, no matter how many times the same visitor may have been to your site.
2. Unique Visit – This is also called Visit by Cookie. A unique visit will tell you which visits from item 1 are visiting your site for the first time. The website can track this as unique by the IP address of the computer. *The number of unique visits will be far less that visits because a unique visit is only tracked if cookies are enabled on the visitors computer*
3. Page View – This is also called Impression. Once a visitor arrives at your website, they will search around on a few more pages. On average, a visitor will look at about 2.5 pages. Each individual page a visitor views is tracked as a page view.
4. Hits – The real Black Sheep in the family. The average website owner thinks that a hit means a visit but it is very different (see item 1). A Hit actually refers to the number of files downloaded on your site, this could include photos, graphics, etc. Picture the average web page, it has photos (each photo is a file and hence a hit) and lots of buttons (each button is a file and hence a hit). On average, each page will include 15 hits.
To give you an example – Using the average statistics listed above, 1 Visit to an average web site will generate 3 Page Views and 45 Hits.
