[Wolves] web stats

[James Turner]

On Sunday 11 Jul 2004 23:20, Rob Annable wrote:
> Ok, I need someone to help me understand something that is probably very
> simple.
>
> Web stats - what's the difference between visits, pages and hits?

The exact criteria used to define each depends on your log analysis software, 
but as a general rule:

A "hit" is a single file fetched from the web server. For example, if a client 
fetches a page which contains 5 images, that counts as 6 hits (1 for the page 
itself, 5 for the images).

A "page" is a file fetched from the server that represents a single web page. 
In the above example, the "hit" for the HTML file would also count as a 
"page", but the images would not be included in the count. The criteria for 
whether or not a "hit" also counts as a "page" is typically based on the 
filetype/extension.

Typically, a "visit" is defined as a sequence of hits from the same client IP 
address with a time gap between adjacent hits of not more than a specific 
threshold. Various other methods of counting visits are also possible, such 
as using session cookies.

Hope this helps.

James