Understanding the analytics reports from your website or blog is crucial to running successful Internet marketing campaigns.  Most people assume everyone knows the definition of simple terms like ‘Unique Pageviews’, but after digging into their reports begin to question their understanding of the term.

When looking at my own web analytics, I pay special attention to unique pageviews and unique visitors.  As an Internet Marketer, I  focus on people and how they are using the site, simply knowing how many ‘hits’ does not provide any actionable insight.  Below I have outlined some simple definitions of common web analytic terms.

• Clicks – indicates how many times the links on your website were clicked by visitors.

• Visits – the number of individual sessions initiated by your visitors.  A session is defined as a 30-minute window of time.  If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session.  Users who leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

• Visitors (aka. Unique Visits) – the initial session by a user during any given date range is considered to be an additional visit and an additional visitor.  Any future sessions from the same user during the selected time period are counted as additional visits, but not as additional visitors.  Visitors is a metric that attempts to count unique ‘people’ visiting your site.

• Pageview – a view of a page on your website.  If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional pageview.  If a user navigates to a different page, then returns to the original page, a second pageview will be recorded as well.  This is a count of every page that is loaded on your website, even duplicate pages viewed during the same session.

• Unique Pageviews – does not count the duplicate pageviews in one user session.  This provides a truer count of the different unique pages viewed by the visitor. In other words, the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.

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