A quick question.

[MrEd]

I'm looking at my site stats, and I noticed a column for "HITS" and one for "VISITS".... What is the difference? For example, on the 8th I had 2539 Hits, but only 67 Visits.

[Mntsnow]

Visits are actual 'visitors" (most likely in your reporting software) Hit's are each call to the webserver for each item so...
html page (1)
picture #1 (2)
picture #1 (3)
frame page 1 (4)
frame page 2 (5)
ect (6)
ect (7) ....In this case there would be 7 "hits" for each time the example page was called for. Hit's always sound cool cause the numbers get huge really fast but now days it's very easy to have a couple of hundred "hits" for a single page "view"

Hope that helps make it a bit easier to understand

[Mntsnow]

Here is a "professional" tracking website's explaination. (Webtrends)

Methods for Measuring Web Site Activity

The three most common measurements of web site activity are hits, page views and user sessions. Following is a description of each.

Total Hits is the total number of files that are requested from the server. This includes all graphics, audio/video files, and other supporting files, as well as the actual html page itself. Total Hits includes all requests in the count whether or not the files were successfully retrieved. Total Successful Hits, on the other hand, are only those files that were successfully served.

Page Views, or Page Impressions is the number of pages viewed. Pages are files with extensions such as .htm, .html, .asp (and a few others). (With WebTrends, you can see (and edit) the full list by clicking Options |Web Log Analysis | File Types, and then Document File Extensions.) Impressions, therefore, are a count of the number of pages viewed and do not include the supporting graphic files. Thus, by definition, you should have more total hits than page views. For instance, if a site has 1 web page with 5 graphics on it, every time a user visited that page, it would be reported that 6 hits and 1 page view or impression occurred.

User Sessions is the number of unique users who visited a web site during a certain time period. Measuring user sessions is more complicated than measuring hits or page views. The user session statistic can be seen as equivalent to "Unique Visits," which, unless every visitor only sees one page, will be less than the number of page views/impressions.

[MrEd]

Thanks. Once again. You're going to have to change your handle to WebGuru pretty soon... j/k. That helped alot.

[RK]

If you are looking for a cool web stats proggie try this one out. We use it at gmta and it is really informative. Also its freeware :)

http://awstats.sourceforge.net/

RK

[Mntsnow]

Thanks RK....I might check that one out as I've been looking for a better stats program too