I need some help to understand stats.

What is the difference between "unique visitors" and "Number of visits"?

What are "Pages"? is this the number of pages opened?

What are the "hits"?

This might be dumb but I'm really confused on it:confused:.

Unique vistors are the diffrent people visiting your site not just ONE person. Number of visits just shows how many people have visited your site.

Unique Visitors - This should really be renamed "Unique IP Addresses" since the calculation is IP based. If you visited your site twice in an hour and you got a new DHCP address from your provider you'd could as 2 "unique" visitors.

Number of Visits - Depending on the stat program the definition may vary. With webalizer a "visit" is defined by a time interval (30 minutes for instance). If you visit your site twice in an hour this would count as 2 visits.

Pages - Again, this depends on your stat program as the definition of what a "page" is is loose. It normally means an html page but stat programs key in on file extensions to figure this out. So while .htm may be a page, .html may not.

Hits - This one most stat programs agree on and it's the easiest to calculate (i.e. no time mumbo jumbo or file extention mappings). This is normall considered the number of successful HTTP requests served. A browser will request each element on your page (i.e. each image, flash bit, etc) using an HTTP request. The 'hits' number is just a count of all of the HTTP requests. The serving of 1 page to a browser almost always results in > 1 "hit" since most html pages have images on them.

Hope this clears things up.

More info here: http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/faq.html

Chris

Wow! thanks for that answer! It really clear things out.