hits vs visitors

[pk698]

in my AWstats, there is hits and visitors. What's the difference? Last month, I had over a million hits but only 10K visitors. is hits the # of times your page loads? :confused:

[Winston]

What is a hit?

Every access to any HTML file or image on the site counts as a hit. That means that if you go to a page which has a logo, three images, and a smaller image at the bottom, that's six hits. When you click on one of the hotlinks, you might rack up seven or eight hits on the next page. By the time you're done browsing the site, you might be responsible for a hundred hits. The more images on a page, no matter how small, the more hits.

What is a visitor?

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period, a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats.

[B&T]

Most all of the visitor counters are bogous. Including the stats packages. They assume that the same visitor is a new visitor based on a time interval (like 10 minutes). The BEST way to track visitors (and the only reliable way) is to track browser sessions. A visitor is still the same visitor until there is a new browser session. If you want to really know how many visitors you have you need a good counter - and not use the stat packages.

Get an accurate counter here:
http://prettyworthless.com/tips.php?tip=counter#tip