Whats the difference between hits and number of users?
- Hits
Each and every request to each and every page, image and other objects.
- Uniques
Number of individual users to visit the site.
- Page views
how may pages were viewed by your visitors.
It must be noted though that hits are really the only accurate one of the two, but still inaccurate because of things like caching but they give you a general idea of whats happening with your site.
There's no way to get 100% accuracy on uniques. Even with the use of cookies, many people clear them from their hard drive. Even through analysing the server log files because of dynamic IPs and proxy servers.
Analog 5.1: How the web works:
- You can't tell the identity of your readers.
- You can't tell how many visitors you've had.
- You can't tell how many visits you've had.
- Cookies don't solve these problems.
- You can't follow a person's path through your site.
- You often can't tell where they entered your site, or where they found out about you from.
- You can't tell how they left your site, or where they went next.
- You can't tell how long people spent reading each page.
- You can't tell how long people spent on your site.
Traffic volumes
As a rough guide
- Low usage pages
vanilla company web sites, personal homepages 20 hits per week
- Medium interest pages
popular home pages, dynamic pages 2000 hits per week
- High interest pages
local news sites, speciallised pages, 20000 hits per week
- Media pages
national news sites, e-commerce sites, 200000 hits per hour