Any website/blog put online on the internet has chances to have visitors from anywhere around the world. These visits are made of terms that are concluded to create a summary on how visitors of the website/blog behave.
Page Impressions, Pageviews, Hits and Unique Visits are four important expressions in web language that are often used for web analytics.
A perfect understanding of these terms as there are often required when it comes to attracting advertisers and space buyers, as well as your concern to your websites/blogs. These terms describe metrics that are used to measure your website's/blog's value and popularity.
Page Impressions and Pageviews
These two terms are often used to mean the same thing but actually have have their differences. While page impressions are used to refer to the number of times an object on a web page is displayed, Page views refers to the number of times the page is viewed partially or fully.
If for examplel, 10 visitors view a page, that doesn't directly mean all the objects (banners,videos,etc) on that page were viewed. For example, a banner at the top of the page generally gets more views (impressions) than one at the bottom. not all visitors will scroll down to the footer of the page.
Google Analytics only provide Pageviews. This is because Google Analytics technology counts the display of a page as whole without paying attention to specific objects on the page.
Website Hits
A web server has a different way of counting hits. On your web space, you have different files like photos, audios, videos, etc. Your web server will count any action on any of these files as hit.
For example, if you have a webpage that has 3 images and 1 video, each time this page loads and displays these files, the server will generate 5 hits. The 5 is made up of 3 images + 1 video + 1 page (the page that is being displayed).
Unique Visits
Unique visits is the number of people that visit a website at least once within a certain given time (hours, days, months, years). The word 'unique' means that even if you visit a site multiple times within the given period, your visit will be counted as 1.
For example, if your blog gets 700 visits a day, advertisers will be more interested in the number of visitors that generated those numbers of visits. That means visits are different from visitors. One visitor can generate more visits.
If 700 visits = 700 visitors, it means each of the 700 visitors only came to your website/blog once. That points to a negative factor. People come and go and mostly don't come back that same day.
When visitors landed on a page and leave because of a specific reason, this will increase the website's/blog's bounce rate. While high bounce rate may not be an issue on single page websites, it calls for concern on websites/blogs with many articles and pages. The more the bounce rate, the less attractive the website/blog is. This may mean one or more of the following:
- It is not attractive.
- It is slow to load.
- It has irritating popup.
- Its entrance page is not interesting.
- It has poor navigation.
- Its article titles are not attractive.
- It is new and/or has less articles.
- It has no internal links.
- It has too many external links.
- etc..
Conclusion
Any website/blog owner should pay attention to the terms about how their website/blog is performing on the World Wide Web. Analytics provide metrics that can be made to create conclusions and strategies to attract more visitors and make the website/blog a better place to be for them.
Concerning about the values of the metrics will make the website/blog owners understand how their visitors behave and how well their website/blog is presented in the open space of the internet.