Hits vs. Page Views

When we first started looking at website statistics, everyone liked to compare how many hits they received. There was frequent puffing of the chest when you could proudly state that your site received 10,000 hits last month, when a friend or competitor's site perhaps only received 2,000. Little did most people realize how useless that statistic truly is.

A "hit" is recorded every time a user or search engine requests a file from your web server. A web page counts as one hit. So does an image, a script, a style sheet, or anything else that may be called during the request. So for instance this page that you're looking at, at the time of this writing has the one page, 8 images, 1 object, 4 scripts and 9 style sheets; each one of these files is requested from the server and recorded as a unique hit when you look at the page, resulting in not 1 hit but 23 hits. If all you want to do is increase the number of hits, add some transparent images on each web page and your numbers will skyrocket.

A much more useful statistic is to look at the number of pages viewed on your site. This returns just the one hit on the actual page file, and doesn't worry about how many times the related images on your server are viewed, or how many times a script was loaded. There may be reasons to look at those numbers at some point, but in general it's the "page views" that you want to evaluate.

Google Analytics only records pages viewed, not such information as other files downloaded; furthermore, you can choose which pages you want to record. GA only records information about the pages in which you insert their Javascript. This is useful if your site has protected or administrative sections that aren't relevant to learning about your site visitors.