Web stats are a mystery to so many.  And what’s worse, some of the unscrupulous practitioners of search engine optimization and other internet marketing practices (and there’s always going to be a handful of people trying to take advantage out there) actually use truthful but inaccurately represented web stats to enhance the perception of what they’re doing.

Remember the old slogan that goes something like, “statistics never lie, but liars often use statistics?” Same goes for web stats.  To make sure someone’s not making a faulty representation of your numbers—regardless of who’s to benefit from the misrepresentation—it pays to have a good understanding of web stats, including Hits, Visitors, and Unique Visitors.

Hits

A hit is simply a statistic that tells you a page within your site has been visited and loaded.  The hit counter is notoriously inaccurate as a measure of actual visitors because one single visitor to your site might visit 10 different pages, only to revisit all ten once again in the same browsing session.  Click, click, click, and before you know it, one single visitor might have racked up 20 or more hits on your site in just a matter of seconds.  Your own visits are also generally counted as hits—making your site’s hit count fun to watch, but not much good for real action or visitor tracking other than for novelty purposes.

Visitors

Quite a bit more helpful than hits alone, measuring your site’s number of visitors takes out some of the duplication and redundancy from the overall hit count.  The visitor count statistic tells you how many times your site has been visited for a given period of time.  But still confusing as a reliable source of transparent tracking information, even your site’s visitors count can have quite a bit of duplication built in.  The Visitor count can count the same visitors (again, including yourself) over and over again—the main difference between visitors and hits is that visitors only count the visiting session to your site once, while hits count each inner page visit, back button click, and page refresh as a additional hit.

Unique Visitors

This is probably the most trusted and dependable web stat of the bunch, due to more advanced tracking capabilities.  Your site’s unique visitor count takes into account unique visitor identifiers (such as a visitor’s IP address) to determine if it is the first time a visitor has landed on your site ever or the first time within a given period of time.  In other words, a unique visitor count only increases by one for each time someone new stops by the site, say in any given day.  While this can still include your own visits to your site, it is much more revealing than the other types of count statistics.

So, using the types of stats above, a typical day for a website might look something like this:

• 1,000 Hits – Each time a page is viewed or refreshed.
• 500 Visitors – How many times during the day that the site was visited, which could include the same individual visitor coming back later in the day for an additional visit to the site.
• 400 Unique Visitors – How many different visitors stopped by the site during the day.

Of course, where things get really interesting is not just looking at these numbers, but actually figuring out which pages are being viewed by who and what sources of referrals are sending visitors to your site.  Transposing advanced visitor analytics over basic hits, visitors, and unique visitor counts is where visitor tracking really begins to become quite helpful and revealing.