New webmasters tends to get confused by all the terms used to measure visitors to your website, I think this post should shed some lights on it, if I got anything wrong, fell free to correct it. If there are other ways of measuring site traffic that I left out, please let me know.


Here we go:

Visit/Unique hits – This refers to visitor to your website, if some one visit your site, have a quick look around, go to one page, or hundreds of pages, this is still only one visit.

Page view – This refers to the number of pages viewed by your visitor.

Hit – The number of physical resources requested from the server by a visitor. Pages are made up of many items (images, text, etc). Each of those is a hit, so you can have many hits on one page but all the hits from one person counts as one visit.