Tuesday, January 20, 2009

So what's the difference?

visits vs pageviews

What constitutes a visit? And what's a pageview? And how do they differ?

7 comments:

Ms Mac said...

I hoped someone would have answered your question by now!

Tina said...

What the hell........??? Oh, maybe a VISIT is if someone clicks on your website and a PAGEVIEW is if they click on the title of a particular post. Like when I sent you the link for my Purse posting only....not the link to my blog.

Obviously I am guessing here but it sounds like a plausible theory! Let me know if you find out.

Anonymous said...

Can't help, I'm afraid, since I know little enough about how wordpress works - never mind blogger.
Bon chance anyway.

Anonymous said...

I think a visit counts 1 each time a unique IP views any page in a specified time period.

Pageviews are the total number of pages visited by all IPs combined.

In the example above, on average, each unique visitor viewed (almost) 2 pages on each visit, for example the front page and then the page that they click on to add a comment.

Simple, eh?

Cassoulet Cafe said...

I need this explained to me too!

Tina said...

Ok, Andy is brilliant. I saw the answer at this site...I looked because I was curious too. But then saw Andy had answered you :-)

http://www.opentracker.net/en/articles/hits-visitors-pageviews.jsp

"For example, if you have a page with 10 pictures, then a request to a server to view that page generates 11 hits (10 for the pictures, and one for the html file). A page view can contain hundreds of hits. This is the reason that we measure page views and not hits."

rashbre said...

What's fun is the occasion where a word or phrase (usually in the title) creates a lot of extra (in my case unexpected) traffic. "New Obama Rumors, Big Brother Winner Error" you get the idea.