Website Statistics Glossary
Hits
Any request made from a browser to your website is considered a 'hit'. The requests can be for anything... HTML pages, graphic images, audio files, etc... This number represents the total number of requests that were made during the specified report period. A Hit is not a good indication of the amount of visitors you get to the site (see Visits below). E.g. If a page has 5 images on it, it would count as 6 hits. One for the HTML page itself, and 1 for each of the 5 images.
Files
Some requests made from the browser, require that the web-server then send something back to the requesting client, such as a html page or graphic image. When this happens, it is considered a 'file'. The relationship between 'hits' and 'files' can be thought of as 'incoming requests from the browser' and 'outgoing responses to the browser'.
Pages
Pages are, well, pages! This does not include the other stuff that goes into a document, such as graphic images, audio clips, etc... This number represents the number of 'pages' requested only, and does not include the other 'stuff' that is in the page. This is sometimes referred to as 'Pageviews'.
Sites
Each request from a browser comes from a unique 'site', which can be referenced by a name or ultimately, an IP address. The 'sites' number shows how many unique IP addresses made requests to the server during the reporting time period. This DOES NOT mean the number of unique individual users (real people) that visited. E.g. If you have a company with 10 people and they are all connected through one Internet connection (such as an ADSL link), they would all only count as one site.
Visits
This is the number of unique visitors to your website. There is a timeout of 30 minutes between visits. E.g. If a user visits your site at 1:00 in the afternoon, and then returns at 3:00, that would count as 2 ‘visits'.
KBytes
The KBytes (kilobytes) value shows the amount of data, in KB, that was sent out by the web-server during the specified reporting period. In general, this should be a fairly accurate representation of the amount of outgoing traffic website has had. Note: A megabyte is 1024 kilobytes
Top Entry and Exit Pages
The Top Entry and Exit tables give a rough estimate of what pages are used to enter your site, and what the last pages viewed are.