Difference in Hits vs Visits in Webalizer?
By Mitch Keeler
One of the many things we give out to our Basic and Business customers is Webalizer, one of the most widely used and popular server side statistic tools you can use. Some people are not sure about one thing when using it. What is the difference between hits and visitors? Are they the same, are they different?
What do “Hits” mean?
Hits would be any request to the server which is logged. This could be both human, as in visitors or other computers, such as search engine spiders or bots. The request can be for anything. It could be for HTML pages, graphics, audio files and more.
What are “Visits” then?
Well if “Hits” are times the files are accessed by man or machine, then visits are when a request is made to the server from a given IP address. Now where it gets a little confusing is Webalizer calculates the time spent by that IP address on the site, page or graphic. If the time difference is larger than the configured “visit timeout” time (or has never visited before) they are considered a new visitor.
Bonus! For more information, I would suggest checking out the read me file for Webalizer.
So in conclusion you could consider hits to be all the times anything accesses your web site and visits is the Webalizer’s best attempt at figuring out how many of those hits are real people looking at your web site. In comparison with tools like Google Analytics, Webalizer might report higher numbers. This is because it can see all the traffic coming in while off-site tools can only gather statistics on the pages they have special tracking codes on. Which is better? That is up for the end user to decide.
March 26th, 2008 at 10:37 am
[...] Difference in Hits vs Visits in Webalizer [...]
March 26th, 2008 at 11:46 am
This was very helpful, Mitch. I hate when there’s jargon I don’t understand right off the bat.
March 26th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Also, adding a guest book page to get real visitor feedback should increase your web ranking.
March 26th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
Finally, I get this!!
March 26th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
It would be nice to keep the google, yahoo, msn and other bots visits out of our Webalizer logs.
Also just seeing the human website visitors/hits and their search phrases would be a great time saver when analyzing the recent visitors.
I do like to know if the bots have come but they seem to be crawling more often than not these days -clogging up the stats.
March 26th, 2008 at 7:24 pm
I have always put most weight in Pages, which I think equates more to an actual URL View. Then if you take visits and pages you can also deduce how many pages/vistor.
March 27th, 2008 at 8:11 am
[...] Difference in Hits vs Visits in Webalizer [...]
April 10th, 2008 at 8:15 am
You state the following:
Now where it gets a little confusing is Webalizer calculates the time spent by that IP address on the site, page or graphic. If the time difference is larger than the configured “visit timeout” time (or has never visited before) they are considered a new visitor
Does “visits” include only what are considered “new” visitors? Or are repeat visits counted as “visits” also? I would appreciate if someone could respond. Thanks!
April 11th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Hey Sara, it does it’s best job at separating new visitors and returning visitors so you can tell how many different people (or PCs) are hitting your hosting account. Where “hits” counts all the times the hosting account is hit up for a response, visits try to separate things out to where each visit is a unique. Hope that helps!