Over the past few days I have had a number of questions asking about the meanings of phrases used in AWStats. So to summarise:
BW
BW stands for bandwidth – the amount of megabytes/gigabytes used per month – this was important when people paid for the amount of bandwidth their website used. It can also be useful for other reasons.
Hits
Each web page may consist of multiple files including the text/html file (index.html), several images (background.png, favicon.ico, photo.jpg), CSS files (styles.css) and JavScript files (jquery.js). Visiting this single page in your web browser would result in 6 hits – one hit for each file requested. Hits are often used/misused to describe the popularity of a website particularly if there is a need to over-estimate that popularity.Using Page Views or Visitors would be considered a more accurate indicator of popularity.
Page View
A page is a content object that a user viewed, such as an HTML file (PHP, ASP), a word processing document, or a PDF file, rather than images, css or javascript.
Visit / Session
A visit constitutes all activity occurring without a break of more than 30 minutes. If you request a page and then wait 29 minutes before requesting a new page both page requests take place during the same visit (or session). However, if you request the subsequent page 30 minutes and 1 second later, that is a new visit. AWStats currently considers a visitor session break to be 60 minutes. Google/Piwik session timeout is 30 minutes.
Visitor
A visitor is the IP address (host) from which the web requests originate e.g. Jonny is 123.111.123.85. There is a potential here for some inaccuracy. For example, if Jonny has 2 work desktops, one home desktop and one mobile device he could potentially look like up to 4 unique visitors. There is also the possibility for inaccuracy if multiple users are accessing from behind a Proxy, or if an ISP frequently re-allocates dynamic IP address, or even if multiple users share a device. Some of these factors are overcome with cookies (Page Tagging) but not all (and cookies introduce their own issues).
Unique Visitors
Jonny (123.111.123.85) may visit www.domain.com several times over the course of a month but would still be classed as 1 unique visitor.
I’ve created a few diagrams to help illustrate the difference between sessions, hits and page views:
