Yesterday, I posted an article about hits vs. pageviews. On a related topic, there’s also confusion over visits and visitors.

Before we begin this classic battle, of visitors vs. visits, let’s first distinguish how they’re different.

Visit: A single session at your site. Could be human, could be a search engine robot or alike.

Visitor: Someone comes to your site, may include multiple sessions. Should be human.

You see, a single visit could, and very likely, result in multiple hits and pageviews.

Let’s walk through an example. When you arrived at this site today, you were counted as a visit and a visitor. You also rang up a pageview and multiple hits (see hits vs. pageviews). The more clicking around you do on this site, the more hits and pageviews are recorded.

If you left and came back in an hour, it could count as another visit but not an another visitor. That’s where it gets a little more complicated. Things that must be considered are how long you were inactive and how long it took you to come back.

Google Analytics state the following:

If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

There’s more. In order to count as a unique visitor, the visitor must have a browser that accepts cookies.

In everyday dialog, I hear people use visit, visitor, and unique visitor all interchangeably, even though they all have different meanings. But what should we use to measure our sites?

Winner: Visits

OK, the truth is, they can both help you so depending on who you ask, you might get a different opinion. I personally prefer looking at visits because I know what I’m getting. I don’t have to worry about whether or not a user’s browser accepts cookies. But ultimately, it’s more valuable to me to look at visits since those numbers include repeat visitors.

Look at your reports from Google Analytics. You’ll see the aforementioned terms all over the place, especially visits. It’s important for you to understand what you’re looking at so you can create tactics to improve targeted areas.

Why hit counters suck

The last thing I mentioned yesterday was that hit counters were bad… well, I believe I used the phrase ‘utterly useless’.

They simply don’t provide very good measurements at all. Not only do they track hits rather than pageviews, but they also can’t distinguish visitors from unique visitors. Spamming the refresh key, which was a very common practice, gave a false impression that more people stopped by than actually did.

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