Page Views vs. Page Hits

 

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When you’re looking at your analytics dashboard, you may notice two separate metrics: “Page views” and “Hits.” Conventional wisdom has evolved to focus on page views rather than hits.

 

Here’s why: A page view is indicated whenever someone loads a page from your site. A hit is every file that is loaded when someone visits a page on your site.

 

By reading this page, you’ve added one page view to the site’s total. Reloading the page or going to another page on this site, you add another one.

 

The number of hits is calculated by adding up every connection the viewer makes with a site — one for loading the page, one for each image and one for invisible files like style scripts and login code, for example.  

 

Most news sites have a lot of images and scripts, especially on the front page where there is a good deal of content in one compact location.  Each connection to one of these registers a “hit.” 

 

Because of this, it is misleading to measure traffic by hits. Page views, unique page views and unique visitors are better ways to figure out exactly how many folks are looking at your website and how many articles they read during a visit.

 

If you track your site’s traffic performance by hits, you’re looking at a skewed picture of just how many people are looking at your site, and what they’re doing during a typical session.

 

Sources: http://bit.ly/1JswEzN, http://bit.ly/1PojO9V