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What is the difference between hits and visits in my
stat reports?

Any request made to the server is considered a "hit". A request can be for any object, an html page, a graphic image, an audio file, a CGI script, etc. So, "hits" are the total number of requests that were received during the specified report period.

A "visit", on the other hand, is a series of "hits" that are deemed to have come from the same browser within a certain amount of time. A "visit", therefore, represents a browser that came to your site for a while and then left.

Each "visit" is composed of many more "hits". For example, when a browser requests one page on your site, webalizer will report 1 hit for the page request, plus 1 more hit for each image or other object (flash object, javascript file, etc) that was referenced on that page. That is why hits are always greater than visits.

Visits are also grouped by time. Webalizer does this by looking at the IP address of the browser and calculates the amount of time since a visitor's last request (if any). If the time difference is greater than a pre-configured 'visit timeout' value (or has never made a request before), it is considered a 'new visit'. The default timeout value is 30 minutes and can be changed by you. So, if a browser visits your site at 1:00PM and then returns at 3:00PM it will be reported as 2 visits.

* In the 'Top Sites' table, the visits total should be discounted on 'Grouped' records, and thought of as the "Minimum number of visits" that came from that grouping instead.

**Visits only occur on PageType requests, that is, for any request whose URL is one of the 'page' types defined with the PageType option. Due to the limitation of the HTTP protocol, log rotations and other factors, this number should not be taken as absolutely accurate, rather, it should be considered a pretty close "guess".

User-Contributed Notes

user -at- example.com
05-Nov-2004 23:01

Got to watch some web companies looking for advertising dollars and
pointing to how large their hit count is. Obviously the site visit
statistics are the ones to value because a site could just have a
thousand useless images on one page and instantly get a thousand hits
when just one person visits. I will only look at site visits from now
on. Thanks for this info.

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