Visitor’s VRS. Hits: What’s the difference? by Jason Pearson

Server logs come in raw data that most hosting companies will provide you with the information in reading form. These programs will allow you to analyze who is sending you traffic, and how many hits and visitors you have had.

The word ‘hits’ has been used all to much as a catch phrase for traffic hitting a web site. It is handy to group all traffic to a site as a hit, but in reality the traffic should be divided into two groups, hits and visitors.

A visitor can be described as a click from one place on the net to your site. In your server logs a visitor will be credited with visiting your site despite the pages that visitor may have looked at while at your site. For example, if that person entered a shoe store and looked at one pair of shoes, they would be counted as one visitor despite the number of shoes they tried on.

A hit on the other hand is a click on any page of the site and represents a multiple of the visitors. So when you take a look at your server logs, a hit represents how many times visitors hit site pages. A hit in a shoe store would be every pair of shoes that person tried on would be a hit.

You may be wondering which one to study then, if they both are analyzed on the server log, and both serve a purpose, which has the biggest impact on your business? The simple answer is that both are important statistics and both have their place in your study. The visitors are important because they show how many people are being directed to your site. It is always good to see how many potential customers are coming your way.

Since hits represent the total number of pages viewed, you can use this information to see how well you website is doing it’s job. Is it enticing visitors to dig deeper and get to the meatier pages? Or are people passing through, taking one look at the first page moving on? Hits are important because they show every visitors history at your site. The best way to determine the depth of your site is to divide the number of hits by the number of visitors for a certain time period. By doing this you will know if people are looking at one pair of shoes or if they are looking around.

Do not discredit the power of the server log, and more so he power of hits verses visitors. Both can give you some insight to the future of your site.

About The Author

Jason Pearson is an online marketing expert who wants to share his secrets with the world. To find out more visit http://www.thewinningbusiness.com