Difference between a hit, pageview, and a visitor

by **Adminkunlex** Fri Feb 28, 2020 6:41 am

A Hit (Internet) is a server request. If someone is viewing a page with two images and some text,
then the browser will have to hit the server at least three times, once to load the HTML file and once each per image. If the page uses an external style sheet
that would be a forth hit. Total hits will be larger than page views.

A Page view is logged whenever some person or user agent loads a Web page on your site. If a person comes to your site and visits 5 pages that would count as 5 page views. If the person returns
next week and visits 5 more pages, then they would have logged 10 page views for the month. Unique
page views include the total number of pages viewed per session. If I visit 5 pages including the about page, but I then return to the about page after viewing another page, the about page is only counted once.
A visitor is a unique person, device or other agent, such as a robot.
Analytics packages usually distinguish these by unique IP addresses. Multiple people visiting from the same Internet account or the same computer may count as the same person depending on how things are configured. One person visiting the site from multiple places and devices will
be generally be counted as more than one person. If I view your site from my computer at home, then
view it from a tablet at Starbucks I may be counted
as two people. If I do this while logged into Google,
then Google Analytics would know to count me as
just one person.
Given that so many of us access the Internet from
multiple locations and devices, it is difficult to get true
numbers for visitors.
Unique user - Wikipedia has
more information.
Ideally your page views will be higher than your
visitor numbers and your hits will be higher than your
page views. Thus in the course of a month one site
might get 8,500 visitors who viewed 38,000 pages
and generated 178,000 hits. We don’t really worry
about the hits, but we do like to see that people are
visiting multiple pages. The pages/visitor ratio will
vary depending on the size and function of the site.

SOURCE