Harking back to my last post about educating on the topics near and dear to interactive agencies, I’ve arrived at another topic; hits are not visitors. These metrics are incredibly useful when evaluating a site for marketing purposes, hardware requirements, coding methods and load times.

So first, let’s define the difference.
A “Hit” is a successful request to your web server from a visitor’s browser for any type of file, including an image, HTML page, MP3 file etc… A single Web page can account for several hits. A simple page might include a logo image, CSS file, HTML code, 6 image based navigation items with 6 more images for rollover effects. The net hits for such a simplistic page would be 15.

By contrast, a “Visitor” or “Session” is a series of clicks by a particular user on your site. If I load the same simple web page in the previous example it would be considered 1 visit. Sessions / Visitors to your site are all given a unique anonymous IDs which track the user throughout the site. The “session state” is used by the Web site to remember things like login information and shopping cart contents.

For comparison purposes let’s look at an example of the differences between hits and visitors using one of our clients for the month of March 2008.

Total Hits: 792,487
Total Visitors: 26,104

So yes, it is important to note the difference in the two measures.

A special note though; Google Analytics won’t track Hits because it uses JavaScript to check visitor behavior and for this reason Google isn’t aware of every hit back to the Web server.