could anyone explain please...

[keithphillips]

The Edge Glamour Models,
Hi,
As far as I am aware, 'hits' are the amount of times one visitor clicks onto different sections of your site. Visits are the amount of individual people who visit. If your hits have gone up but not your visitors then this means the same number of people are visiting more of your site. I may be wrong, but I think that is how it works.
Keith

[AJPSnr]

Hi Pleasureville

A "Hit" is recorded everytime a request is made to the server. For example if the page has multiple images on it each one counts as a hit. The request for the html page also counts as a hit. So its not really of any use when measuring a sites popularity (although the press love using the term hits).

You are better to measure the sites progress in terms of visitors, either unique or otherwise.

Hope this helps a bit.

[Ron T. Storm]

I use www.hitslink.com for my site. Shows visitors and where countries they come from. It is good. They offer a free trial,

Matt

[AlpineJoe]

>... so basically if my hits have more than quadrupled and my visits have remained the same.. a bot or someone is having a laugh.. i.e. maybe checking everything out 4 times etc.

Its difficult to tell exactly what is happening unless you track people better.

It sounds like you are doing well, visitors are spending longer on your site and looking at more pages. Thats a good thing. If your hits go down out of proportion to your visitors thats bad, because people are spending less time on your site. This is an advance sign that your visitors and subscribers are about to drop.

If you've made changes to your site, for example by adding more images, then you'll automatically see more hits for the same number of visitors. For example, if you introduce a new page of thumbnails with 20 small images on, then you'll get at least 21 hits for that page every time someone visits it. It that replaced a simple text page, then you might see a 20 fold increase in your hits, but it doesn't mean you've got any more visitors.

Its a big subject, but I hope that helps.

[uganda]

Hallo Gary,

Just use http://www.google.com/analytics/

it will show you a lot

Cheers

Francis

[AJPSnr]

Hi Pleasureville

As AlpineJoe says its difficult to tell if its a bot or something, but it could be a case of more images, so more hits.

I like the google stuff, so that would be a good place to start if you want to analyse traffic more. My suggestion if you want to get into looking at your stats in more detail is to start with what key words people are finding you on (especially in google) and try to optimise the site to appear higher. Also worth checking to see where most of your traffic is coming from.

If your visitors are spending longer on your sites thats generally a good thing. The best traffic are those visitors that return and spend a lot of time on the site.

[paul jones]

Sunday Uniques 282 Pages 3009 Hits 14466 Bandwidth 7.85 GB

This is one day simple data for my site (from my hosts stats service).

What I watch is Uniques and Pages - at the moment each person is looking at about 10 pages, which makes sense because it's mainly repeat visitors - they know where to find what they want.

Hits is unimportant - it just depends how the page is built (Uk Art Nude is more than 100 hits to load the page, on account of all the photos).

When I do a bit of promotion to new people the pages goes up to 20-30 per visitor, and hits goes off the scale (all those big Model Search pages), as they work out where to get the stuff they want.