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Hit Counts Explained

Statcounter revamped their graphics recently and the image with the bar graph no longer includes the key.  Even before, the key did not include an explanation and a lot of people ask me what it means.

Below is a graph I downloaded at about 5:30 this morning:

daily-rpu-labels-bar-last7days

The green bar represents total page loads.  It includes all visits to the blog even multiple visits by one user.  It also includes all page loads within a visit.  For example if you look at the comments for a certain entry that will add the the page views count.  If you then send a comment, that will add another hit.  When to you return to the main page, that will add still another hit.  If you refresh the page to see if any more comments have come in, or to see if there is anything new up there, it will count that too.  So the green bar basically represents total activity on the blog for any given day.

The blue bar is unique users.  The program uses a cookie to check the ip of every hit.  So yesterday, for example, 375 individual computers visited the site.  As they navigate around or revisit later, they will drive up the page loads count but not the unique user count for that day.  As you see, early in the morning the page load count is close to the unique user count, but as the day goes on the total page loads climbs much faster than the unique users.

Some people have software that blocks the Statcounter cookie.  I’m not sure if in those cases, the users aren’t counted at all or if they are counted every time time they visit.  I don’t think it’s a significant number of people though.

The yellow bar represents return visitors.  This is the total who have made more than one visit to the blog on that day.  These are the hard core readers who drive up the page load counts by checking the blog multiple times throughout the day.

BTW, it doesn’t count activity by any computers with one of my ips, so I’m not driving up my hit counts unintentionally or otherwise.

Hope this was helpful to you.

3 Comments

  1. Tulip wrote:

    Yes. Thank you

    Monday, August 4, 2014 at 11:50 am | Permalink
  2. PJ wrote:

    Dave,
    How am I able to download a pic? Do you have an email address?

    Monday, August 4, 2014 at 5:09 pm | Permalink
  3. admin wrote:

    dave@commonsenseforbelmar.com

    Monday, August 4, 2014 at 5:48 pm | Permalink

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