Question – PowerSite Statistics

ico_powerstats.gifQuestion: I have a question about the stats. In general, I would expect the number of Visits to be lower than the number of Page Views, and that’s how it started out for my site. However, for quite some time now, it’s been flipped. The stats are showing more Visits than Page Views, and I can’t make sense out of that. Can you please help me understand what’s going on here?

Answer: The visits tracks every unique session to the server. A session does not require a particular page to be requested. Consider a site is listed on Trulia, every time the listing comes up on the Trulia search a picture will be displayed on the Truila search result. The picture request coming from Trulia does not request a specific page, but it is a unique visitor requesting one of the property photos. It would count as a visit at the site level but would not count as a visit for a particular page.

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Key Terms:

Visits: A count of each time someone viewed your PowerSite. They can look at dozens of pages, download documents, floor plans etc. but this still counts as 1 visit. That same person could view your PowerSite later the same day and would count as another visit.

Page View: Is a count of each PowerSite page displayed. The whole page (images and photos) counts as 1 view.

Hit: Is the number of items displayed to your clients including a Web page, graphic or a photo. Each one counts as 1 hit.