Over a week ago someone asked me what’s the difference between page impressions and unique visitors. Page impression or ‘hits’ is the number of times someone has landed on the page that is recording the statistics, e.g. front page. If your hits counter has recorded 2000 hits, it means the page has been loaded 2000 times. This does not mean you have had 2000 visitors. In fact, it could be just one person (including yourself) who has refreshed the page 1999 times.
If your visitor counter is recording unique visitors however, it would depend on your counter’s settings for you to know how many visitors landed on your website. Generally, IP addresses is what’s used to count someone as a unique visitor. So if you checked your webiste at the office, and again at home, this will be counted as 2 unique visitors. You can visit the site as many times a day, but if you are using the same computer, then this will be counted as one unique visitor.
The importance of unique visitors is to determine how many people out there are actually visiting your website. If there is a continuous improvement on the total number, then you are doing a good job. If you have posted something on your website and all of a sudden you noticed a sudden increase in the number of unique visitors, then you know what type of content your readers enjoy.
This doesn’t mean a site’s page impression isn’t useful. If every page has a separate hit counter, your collected data will allow you to know which pages are being visited most, and which pages aren’t being visited at all. This information is important, for you to improve on the pages of your site or for you to know the pages that are receiving the most visits and re-visits. So both stats have their individual uses.
Although, it’s important to remember that a high untampered unique visitor rating means a high number of page impressions, but a high number of page impressions does not necessarily mean a high unique visitor rating. So if you have a high genuine unique visitor rating, you really have something to be proud about.
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WYSIWYG! I'm a simple person trying to live the simplest life possible - it seems to be the most difficult thing to achieve! I'm an internet enthusiast and I've been a webmaster since early 2007. I like: blogging, developing sites using open source software, social media, computer games, '80s music, comedy & horror, animals, crunching on M&Ms peanut and Smarties!
