Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits Demystified

This article is an introductory level and the intention of this article is to clarify few terms that you constantly hear in Web Analytics. Why am I writing this article? I hear some confusion about these terms from people new to field, so I thought I will write this blog post to clarify some of the common terms.

I am going to explain, Hits, Page Views, Visitors and Visits in this blog post.

Hits

Back in the early Internet days, Hits was a term commonly used to measure websites traffic. This term was mainly used by IT folks, early users of web analytics tools, to get an idea of the load on the server. As Web Analytics has moved into marketing and we have move to JavaScript based solutions, this term does not hold much meaning today as terms such as Page Views, Visits and Visitors have taken over.

So what is a Hit anyway? Let’s take an example of a simple web page shown below


This page is an html file with one image embedded in it.

When a person browses to this page (in her internet browser), she is requesting this page from the server to be downloaded to her internet browser. She views this page as one entity. In return browser is actually requesting 2 items from the server

1. The actual HTML page


2. The image embedded in it

When server returns these items, the browser assembles them and makes them look like one page to the person browsing this page.

This is what the log file of the server might look like (I have removed several items to make it simple)

291.111.276.23 - - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /samplepage.html HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"

291.111.276.23- - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /batman.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"


That means there were 2 hits on the server, one for the html page and one for the image. So with one page request there are 2 HITS (in this example)

All the above items will show up in your analytics reports if

1. You use log file based solution


2. You do not filter them out when setting up your reports

If you use a JavaScript solution then the only thing which is tagged (contains the JavaScript code) is the HTML page and that’s the only thing which will show up in the Web Analytics report.

Now let’s take a look at this sample again but this time we will look at the source to make sure there are no items hidden behind the HTML code. Sometimes (read most of the time) there are files that are not visible to the individual but still need to be downloaded from server and count towards the hits.

Here is what the source code looks like:



You will see there are two more files that are embedded in the page. One is a style sheet (stylesheet.css) and the other is a JavaScript (myjavascript.js) file.

So when a user requests this page, a total of 4 files are being requested from the server

• The actual html page


• The image embedded in it.


• The .css file (stylesheet)


• The .js (JavaScript File)

This is how the log file will look like

291.111.276.23 - - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /samplepage.html HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"

291.111.276.23- - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /batman.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"

291.111.276.23- - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /stylesheet.css HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"

291.111.276.23- - [16/Jun/2007:11:17:55 -0400] "GET /myjavascript.js HTTP/1.1" 200 3225 "http://www.anilbatra.com/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows XP; en-US; rv:1.8.1.7) Gecko/20070914 Firefox/3.0.0.7"

If you are counting the Hits then there are 4 Hits on the server. It is evident it does not make a lot of sense to count Hits. Let’s look at what make sense (at least for now).

Page Views

According to Web Analytics Association Standards, “Page is an analyst definable unit of content”. Page Views is the number of times a page (an analyst-definable unit of content) was viewed.

So what does it mean? It means you can define type of file, Module, Flash interaction, PDF etc as a page and when a user views them they can be counted as Page Views.

Let’s use the above example and define a valid page as the files with .html extension only. When using a log file solution we configure the tool to filter out the other types of requests and only count pages with .html extension as valid pages. In a JavaScript based solution, all other types of files mentioned above (except .html in this case, if it has the JavaScript tag) will be automatically excluded from the Page View count.

So how many pages will the analytics report show? One, as there is only one html page. (You can configure your JavaScript based web analytics tool to track other forms of files as page views too but that requires customization).
The one page that is showed in the reports is a page view.

Visitors or Unique Visitors

Visitors or Unique Visitors, sometimes also referred as Unique Users is the number of unique individuals visiting a site. The most common way to identify an individual is via an anonymous cookie. Keep in mind that this is a close estimate of unique visitors and not an exact measure. Here are four examples on how unique visitor count can be wrong

1. If two people use the same computer and same browser to visit a site, that identifies users by an anonymous cookie, both of them will be counted as one unique visitor since their cookie will be the same.


2. On the flip side, if one individual uses two different computers to access the same site, the individual will be counted as two unique visitors because the new anonymous cookie will be issued on both the computers and show up as two different cookies in the analytics tool and hence will count them as two different visitors.


3. If an individual uses the same computer but two different browsers (say IE and Firefox) then the person will be counted as two unique visitors because each browser will have its own cookie.


4. If the individual visits the site, she will be counted as one visitor. Then if she clears her cookie and then visits the site again, she will be counted as two visitors.

Note: Visitors are calculated over a period of time e.g. day, week, month, year etc. and a visitor count from two periods can not be added together to get a total visitor count. Let’s take the data for following 2 days
Day 1 - 30 visitors
Day 2 – 45 visitors

The total visitors count for day 1 and day 2 is NOT the sum of the visitors count for the two days i.e. it is not 75 (30+ 45). Why?

For simplicity let’s assume that all the visitors who came to the site on day 1 also returned to site on day 2. In that case we will have 30 visitors from day 1 and 15 (45-30) on day 2 as unique between those two days, making the total unique to be 45 for the two day period and NOT 75.

The calculation I showed above has been simplified for this example. My advice is to let the analytics tool do the calculation for you and not sum the visitor count from separate period to come up with the total count of unique visitors.


Visits

Visit is also known as session. Visit starts when a visitor interacts with this site. In most case the interaction is the first page view by the visitor. The visit ends when user does not interact with a site for specified period of time. Most of the web analytics tools set 30 mins of inactivity as the end of the visit, however in most tools it is configurable and you can set it to whatever makes sense for your business.

Unlike, unique visitors, total visits to the site can be summed across time periods to get the total visit count for the period.

Hope this clarifies some of the confusion surrounding these terms.

Questions? Comments?

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Have you used Clop.in a URL shortner with real time analytics? http://clop.in

Adding “bing” to Organic Search in Google Analytics

A while ago I wrote blog post on how to add Twitter searches to appear in organic searches. The same principal can be applied to include Microsoft’s new search engine “bing” which is not yet recognized by Google Analytics as a search engine. Till Google Analytics recognizes it as a search engine, you can capture the data in organic searches by a simple one line of code.

GA provides the following function to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X"); to track any custom search engine.

NewOrganicEngine is the words that identify the search engine; in this case we will use “bing.com”

newOrganicKeyword is the query string that contains that keywords, in this case it will be “q” as “bing” uses “q” as the query string that contains the keyword.




Here is how your final code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-XXXXXX-X");
pageTracker._addOrganic("bing.com", "q")
pageTracker._trackPageview();

Questions? Comments?

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How intelligent are your Toll Free Numbers, Landing Pages and Promotional Codes?

Sending a toll free number (800, 866, 877 etc.), links to special landing pages, micros sites or promotion codes in the print material or email is a common practice. However before you send that promotion to your customers, make sure it can be tied back to campaign and the offer that you sent. Make sure your site, automated phone system and customer service reps. know what those special promo codes or toll free numbers mean. Do not waste your customer and your own time.

The point of that promotion is to grab customer’s attention and get share you their wallet. When a customer takes action on the offer that she just received, the customer expects that the web page/site or the human answering that call is intelligent enough to provide information on that offer and help her convert. I am however amazed how often this minor detail is totally missed due to lack of communication between marketing, sales and customer support.

I recently received a direct mail from Comcast “Free DVR for 1 tear and 1 year installation”. I called the 866 number listed on the mailer. To my disappointment, I was greeted with a standard recorded message that had nothing to do with the mailer I received. The system asked me some standard information to identify me but I did not hear an option that was even remotely related to what was mentioned on the letter.

So what was I suppose to do, which option should I have selected? I did nothing. The message repeated itself and then finally it (automated system) transferred me to a human representative.

Human representative made the same mistake as did the recorded message. She asked me how she can help me. I told her about the mailer I received and was calling about it. She goes "Great ! I can get that to you for free and there will be $14.99 charge for installation". I reminded her that my offer also said that I will get free installation. She asked me to be on hold for few minutes while she checked the offer I might have received.

She came back and gave me free installation because apparently the mailer I received had the code for free installation. I was not able to locate any code on my mailing but it seemed like there was some database she could go back check about my offer.
As a consumer, I was a little disappointed with this experience. I am enjoying my free DVR service though.

Even though this is an example of the toll free number, the same principal applies to web. If you do send out that special landing page or promo code make sure it provides the customers with relevant information and take them into easy conversion path. Do not waste their time. If you do provide a toll free number on that landing page, make sure you customer service/sales reps know the offer that those toll free numbers belong to. Customer is ready to be converted, don’t waste their time, just do it (convert them).

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What Is Your Conversion Rate?

When most marketers and analyst talk about conversion rate they seem to quote around 2 to 3% as the average conversion rate. Bryan Eisenberg wrote a great article on this subject titled The Average Conversion Rate: Is It a Myth?

In this article he writes:
“The sites that should convert 2 to 3 percent of their traffic are the exception, not the rule. I've long stated that sites that convert less than 10 percent should be concerned. Consider this along with the rising cost of online traffic, and the concern becomes a nightmare. Too many online marketers are spending too much money and time throwing too much unqualified traffic at their sites, then tweaking their traffic quality trying to reach the 2 to 3 percent mythical conversion rate.
If more online marketers focused their efforts on studying visitor intent and site optimization, instead of just driving traffic, their average conversion rates would be much, much higher.”

To inspire you or to make you depressed (the choice is yours) here are some of the top conversion rates for e-commerce sites as reported by Marketingcharts.com.



Source: Marketing Charts (via Nielsen Online)
Note: To be considered, e-commerce sites must have had a minimum of 500K unique visitors during the month. Conversion-rate data is based on visitor conversion rates, not session conversion rates: i.e., No. of unique customers/No. of unique visitors.

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Conversation with Barry Parshall, VP of Product Strategy, WebTrends

Continuing my series of conversation with Webtrends executives at Engage conference here is my conversation with Barry Parshall, VP of Product Strategy at WebTrends




Also check out

• Conversation with Alex Yoder, CEO of Webtrends


• Conversation with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, VP of Marketing Webtrends


• Conversation with Casey Carey, VP of Products, WebTrends

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Looking to fill your Web Analytics or Online Marketing position?
Post your open jobs on http://www.web-analytics-jobs.com/
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Site: AnilBatra.com
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WAA Board of Directors

I am very honored and excited to be elected to the Board of Web Analytics Association.

I would like to thank all of you who provided support and encouraged me during me run for the WAA board. If it were not for Seth Romanow I probably would not be a board member today. Seth encouraged me and convinced me that I should run for the board. Thank you Seth.

I would also like to thank all of you voted for me. I know it was a tough to decide who to vote for because we had so many great candidates.

I will be in San Jose for eMetrics starting Sunday May 3rd . If you are going to be there I would love to meet with you to discuss where WAA needs to focus in coming year. If you are not going to be there, you can always email me at batraonline@gmail.com and send me you phone number. I look forward to speaking with you.

Thank You
Anil Batra

Conversation with Casey Carey, VP of Products Webtrends

Continuing my series of conversation with Webtrends executives at Engage conference here is my conversation with Casey Carey, VP of Products at WebTrends



Also check out my

• Conversation with Alex Yoder, CEO of Webtrends


• Conversation with Jascha Kaykas-Wolff, VP of Marketing Webtrends