Difference between hits and visits?

Im looking at my site stats through AWstats...

Could somebody tell me how to read these stats a lil better...

I know what unique visitors are...What i dont understand is the amount of views compared to the pages and hits...

Yesterday my site had like 3K visits...Over 13K pages....and over 70K hits.....

How do visits differ from pages...and how do both of those differ from hits...

Why are my visits only in the 3K range but yet my hits are up over 70K...Does this mean pages on my site are being accessed over 70,000 times a day?

im lost

 

Read the AWStats Glossary !

Jean-Luc

 

thanks for the link

 

I think im right in saying, a hit can be an access from the browser to any file on your webserver (images, css), whereas a visit, is per page loaded

 

Example :

I visit your site. This is counted as 1 visit.

In the process, i request 2 html files, 5 gif images and 1 css file.
That will be counted as 2 + 5 + 1 = 8 hits

Within the next 24 hours, i visit the same site with the same IP address,
and request 10 files this time.

So, that's a total of :

1 Unique Visitor, 2 Visits, and 18 Hits.


Hope this clears your doubts.

 

Thanks for asking, I had the same question, it yeilded useful information!

 

According to me, hit is only to click on a particular link and visit is loading of that web page.

 

same here, I have a blog that use a stat widget and it counts hits when I click on links.
so Hits = Clicks am I correct?

 

Everybody is free to use his own personal definition of hits and visits.

I put a link to the definitions used by AWStats in a post above. Other software packages might use slightly different definitions, but it would be very unusual to say that hits and clicks are the same thing.

Jean-Luc

 

The example by Shadab is very clear. A hit is usually understood to be any request to any file in your site. When the request is of a page (i.e., an HTML, PHP, etc. document) it is called a page view. A visit means that several files are requested from the same IP in a given interval.

 

that is wrong !

Shadab's definition above is right
except that the time for a visit may be configured and defined in access stat SW and normally is less than 24 hrs for a visit.
since we have many ISP with dynamic IPs - one IP may be used by several different persons showing up on your site.
for that reason - for example in webalizer SW - defines one visit as 30 minutes with same IP.

clicking on a LINK usually results in a page-load - what pages are may also be defined in some access SW ( .html, .php, .pdf, .asp, etc )
one page-load resulting in a number of hits as Shadab explained correctly.

 

http://blog.v7n.com/2007/01/12/website-metrics/

This can help you..

 

And I would just like to add that you should for your own good start looking after a better solution to analysing your web metrics

 

What about a site that is AJAX versus a normal html site.

Some clicks with an AJAX based site would count as normal page loads on an html site, right?