Understanding Hits...?

[Phirewire]

My site has frames in it... And according to the site stats this is what I see...

Total Hits- 1372
Total Files- 1055
Total Pages- 289
Total Visits- 38

Do I look at Visits over Hits? or vice versa? But another stat gives hits on web browser...

IE
MSIE 6.0 Windows NT 5.1- hits 266
etc... and it equals the Total Hits.

The site stats kindof contradict them selves... some say I have 38 hits and others say I have 1372 hits... Im confused...

[(jj)]

This question gets asked quite often :)

Hits are each item that a browser requests to load. So if you have a page with 4 images on it, the total hits for that page would be 5 - 4 for the images and 1 for the page itself. Your browser stat count is just for that, the specified browser requested 5 items for that page, so that browser would be awarded 5 hits for the requests.

[rainbore]

To follow up a bit on jj's comments...

Visits is the number of unique visits to your site. This is usually calculated by checking the logs for accesses and sorting them by IP number within a period of time. For most webmasters, I think this is the most important number, but you also should keep an eye on the hits count or the "pages" or "hits" count (take your pick). The ratio of hits to visits is an indication of the "stickiness" of your website. That is, its a broad measure of how much the average visitor browses through your website once he's discovered it. For small sites like I run, the absolute numbers or their accuracy to the last decimal point isn't nearly as important as the trend over time. So if you pick "hits" or "pages", it isn't really vital. As long as the numbers are rising, I'm a happy camper.

[stevel]

I would ignore hits as a measure of site usage - it is highly dependent on how many images you load on a page. Often, the home page has more images than other pages on a site, so if the user "stuck" for hours, browsing non-image-heavy pages, you wouldn't see that by counting hits.

Hits can be useful when looking at individual file statistics. If a particular image is hit much more often than the page on which it is found, that suggests someone is referencing it from outside, aka "leeching".

[Phirewire]

what ever happened to the standard hit counter? My angelfire site has frames and it has over 500 hits ... and it doesnt refer to images as hits... and its got a ton of images on the index page... statistics get to confusing and complicated this day in age...

my site www.jmvii.com has very little images and uses frames... so its hard to say where the hits are coming from...

oh well i guess i can either lie and say that the site is getting a lost of hits... or find a better hit counter...

[(jj)]

Stats and counters are two totally different creatures.

Stats measure much more than just the number of people visiting your site, while "hit" counters actually only measure the number of times a certain page is requested similar to what "visits" are in your stats.

Some counters will record each and every time a page is requested, even if the visitor just hits the Reload button. Other counters will only measure page requests once from any given IP within a certain time period.

Stats record everything, you just have to learn how to decypher what it all means :)