Q:
What do each of the following categories represent?
1) Number of Visits
2) Pages
3) Hits
A:
1) The number of Visits refers to the number of Unique Visitors who have visited your site. A person who visits spotlets.com just once is a Unique Visitor. In other words, repeat views of a site by the same person would only register as one Unique Visit.
2) The pages shows how many different pages were viewed. If you have 20 Unique Visitors who only view your home page, you would have 20 Page Views as well. However, if each of those 20 visitors viewed three pages each, you'd have 60 Page Views.
3) The number of Hits differs from the number of visits in that the number of hits is determined by the different number of elements of a page. For example, let's say you have 100 pictures on your home page and you've had just one Unique Visitor view your site. You'd have 100 Hits, one visit, and one Unique Visitor. Other variables (such as banners, images, etc.) all effect the number of Hits as well.
Q:
For a company that uses its own site as a reference throughout the workday: are the personnel there considered one Unique Visitor or do they each count as one?
A:
Each unique IP address counts as one Unique Visitor. If your office has one IP address, then your entire office, no matter how many individuals are logged on, it will count as one Unique Visitor to your site. It is possible that your office has multiple IP addresses, or even a dynamic IP address (one that fluctuates). To find out, you should ask your IT personnel how your IP address(es) are set up.
Q:
I would like to clarify a few things regarding Unique Visitors. A colleague of mine thought that a person with the same IP address coming on to the site one day and then the next day would be counted as two Unique Visitors. Do the IP addresses start over from day to day? It was also indicated that if a time lapse of a reasonable length (I believe It’s around a couple hours) exists between visits from a single IP, then this will be calculated as more than one visit. Is this true?
A:
From what you're asking, I believe that you may be confusing two different elements: the number of Unique Visitors and the number of Visits. As mentioned before, a Unique Visitor is attached to an IP address. Again, IP addresses may fluctuate or may stay static depending on your system. You would have to ask your IT personnel how your network's IP addresses are setup.
As for the number of Visits, let's look at an example:
If Larry goes to your a site from his computer (one IP address) once a day, then after a week, your website would have registered seven Visits from one Unique Visitor. If Larry goes to your website on Monday and looks at another website for five minutes or so before going back to your website, he would still only have one Visit to your website for Monday. If he were to visit your site at 9AM on Monday and then at 4PM the same day, your site would have registered two Visits by one Unique Visitor to your site for Monday (Larry is viewing your site twice from the same IP address).
So, for your question, It was also indicated that if a time lapse of a reasonable length (I believe It’s around a couple hours) exists between visits from a single IP, then this will be calculated as more than one Visit. Is this true?, the answer would be, Yes, it is true because more than one Visit was made from ONE IP address (one Unique Visitor).
As for your first remark, a person with the same IP address coming onto the site one day and then the next day would be counted as TWO Unique Visitors, that would NOT be true. Why not? Because the SAME IP address (if we're assuming it stays static), would only count as ONE Unique Visitor, regardless of the number of actual VISITS made.
