Need Help Understanding Traffic #'s

[loutam]

I was wondering if someone could explain the discrepancies i see in the 3 tools I use to understand my traffic numbers. Please keep in mind I only started my blog 6 weeks ago so I know the numbers are laughable in scope but I still want to understand them. Here are 3 examples from yesterdays report December 10th.

My Host Provider Report:
no. of visits 219
Pages 726
Hits 3999
Bonus question: What is the difference between visits and Hits?

Google Analytic s
Visitors 78
Page Views 113

Google Adsense
Page impressions 103

I would assume my host reports are the best tool but why such a broad difference between the 3?

I thank you in advance if someone can help lift the veil of ignorance from my face.

Lou

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[WhoJayBe]

Actually, I find that hosting tools isn't that accurate when it comes to real stats. But to try to answer your questions, visitors are the actual person visiting your site and pageviews/hits are the number of pages those visitors check out within your site.

For instance, your 78 visitors saw a total of 103 pages within your site.

For your Adsense, the 103 page impressions on an estimate on how many times an ad shows up for any given person going through your site.

I hope I made sense lol... if not, let me know and I'll try to explain it better.

[stephen todd]

Originally Posted by loutam

I was wondering if someone could explain the discrepancies i see in the 3 tools I use to understand my traffic numbers. Please keep in mind I only started my blog 6 weeks ago so I know the numbers are laughable in scope but I still want to understand them. Here are 3 examples from yesterdays report December 10th.

My Host Provider Report:
no. of visits 219
Pages 726
Hits 3999
Bonus question: What is the difference between visits and Hits?

Google Analytic s
Visitors 78
Page Views 113

Google Adsense
Page impressions 103

I would assume my host reports are the best tool but why such a broad difference between the 3?

If you have 1 adsense block on every page of your site, then use that - it's going to be accurate, unless someone hits the back button within seconds, and adsense does not have time to load

Host stats greatly inflate visitors count due to search bots hitting and crawling the site - adsense only counts real people

[Nathan]

Hits are very different from visitors. A hit counts requests for images, CSS, and other resources. One page view by one visitor could generate twenty or more hits.

[mitchman3]

Just to add this, hits can come from other sources as well. When Google comes crawling your site, that's a hit, and it can generate lots of hits while it's there as well. Same for other search engines.

[RateMyBlog]

Here's my take on the various stats:

Unique visitors - counts once for each person, no matter how many times they visit or how many pages they view

Visits - how many people (including bots) visited. If the same person visits your site once in the morning and again later in the day this counts as two visits.

Pages - the number pages viewed.

Hits - think of this as number of requests to the server, includes requests for images and other stuff so this tend to be the biggest number.

Adsense impressions - number of times page with adsense ads was loaded.

Hope that helps!