Web Traffic Report

We get a lot of questions about how to read a web traffic report. A good report has three measures of traffic: hits, page views, and sessions. You need to interpret these correctly to get an accurate picture of how your site is performing.

Of the three measures "hits" is the most misleading. A Web Server records a hit whenever it does anything at all. A hit can be a web page, an image, or anything else. If a web page contains 25 images, the server records 26 hits each time that page is served. When a person says their site is doing 20,000 hits a week they are wildly overstating performance by as much as 50 to 1.

A "page view" is recorded each time a page is served. If someone comes to your site and looks at 10 pages, the server records 10 page views. A page view would be like a shopper looking at an item on the shelf.

A "session" is the true measure of site traffic. The server opens a session the moment someone enters your site and maintains it during their visit. Programmers use sessions to create shopping carts because sessions track users from page to page. A session is a measure of how many shoppers come in through the front door. Average Sessions Per Day is a measure of how many shoppers you have daily. Ten is fair, forty is good, and over 100 a day is great.