Which Should You Analyze - Hits Or Visitors

Part of any website campaign is traffic analysis. By tracking and analyzing website traffic, webmasters will be able to see whether the website’s campaigns are doing any good, in terms of bringing in potential customers. What do you measure in traffic analysis? Is it hits or is it visitors? What is the difference between hits and visitors?

In analyzing the traffic on a website, webmasters need to look at the server logs. The server logs provide the information that shows the number of hits and visitors that a website receives, the source of the traffic, and other vital traffic analysis information.

The Difference Between Hits And Visitors

The server logs show the number of hits and visitors that a particular website gets in a particular period. What is a hit and what is a visitor? More often than not, some webmasters use these words interchangeably as if they mean the same thing. In traffic analysis, it should not be the case. In analyzing traffic, webmaster must understand the difference between the two.

Visitor refers to the click that a website receives from the internet. The server logs show the number of visitors that a website receives and count each of them as one irregardless of the number of pages they have clicked and visited within the website. So a person who clicked the website’s listing will be counted as one visitor irregardless of the number of page views he has performed.

Hits, on the other hand, refer to the number of clicks that a website and its pages receive. The server logs show the total number of click that a website gets from its visitor. One site visitor who has clicked a hundred times within the website is considered as a hundred hits.

Which Should You Measure?

In terms of website traffic analysis, both visitors and hits are important. The number of visitors tells you the number of potential customers that has visited your website. The hits tell you about the effectiveness of your website and its pages. By looking at the hits, you will know whether the site visitors are clicking on your internal pages or not.

Neither of the two should be disregarded if you want to come up with a reliable and valid website traffic analysis. They both reveal something about your website and they can both help you devise better web marketing strategies to improve your website’s performance, traffic and eventually its conversion rate.

Traffic Analysis involves two crucial components: hits and visitors. Need to track and analyze your website traffic? Please see Website Traffic Analysis service or apply for a Free Website Analysis. For more information, please contact our Site Traffic Experts.