Search Marketing overview
In webdesign, there are several terms to describe the statistics and amount of traffic the website receives.
Here is a typical segment from a Website statistics report:
www.xyz.com Month of January 2010
Visitors 1000
Visits 2000
Page Views 10,000
Hits 100,000
Visitors
The number of different people who have visited the Website.
Bob, Mary, and Jane and 997 other people are all visitors.
This term is also known as:
Users
Unique Visitors
Unique Users
Sites/ IP Addresses
Visits
The total number of times visitors came to the Website.
These 1000 different people all visited the site 2 times each on average.
This term is also known as:
User Sessions
Sessions
Page Views
The total number of pages the visitors viewed.
Every time someone visited the site, they viewed 5 different pages on average.
This term is also known as:
Pages
Impressions
Hits
The total number of files the server was asked to send out.
Most Web pages, unlike Word documents, are made up of multiple files. If you view a Web page with 5 pictures in it, you are viewing at least 6 files – one each for the 5 pictures, and one HTML file to supply the text and tell the pictures where to appear.
In the example above, the average Web page on www.xyz.com is made up of 10 files.
It is important to keep in mind that all of the ways Web traffic can be measured are highly prone to error, and so 2 different programs or services reporting on the same Website will not match.