There seems to be quite a bit of confusion and, yes, outright deception going around about Web site statistics. So, here’s a quick breakdown for you. I’m going to use as an example the stats program AWStats. It’s a very common feature offered by hosts as a way of tracking your traffic.

Here’s an example of a general overview of a full month’s traffic.

The number under the orange header reflects the amount of unique visitors. This is the number of unique IPs that have accessed the site, which means it’s a pretty accurate count of the number of different people who have visited your site. This is the most important number! For an idea of what kind of numbers are realistic in this area, a NYT bestselling author might have 5,000-10,000 unique visitors a month.

The number under the yellow header reflects the amount of visits. The second most important number, this will show you how many times your site has been viewed. Divided by the unique visitors, it’ll tell you the average number of visits per person (shown in parenthesis). Obviously, you want your visitors to return to your site, so a high number here is a good thing. But it’s important to keep in mind that if this says 5,000, that does not mean 5,000 people have viewed the Web site. Only the number of unique visitors will be an accurate tally of that.

The number under the blue header reflects the number of pages that have been loaded. Each time a single visitor goes to any one of your pages, it counts as one page load. In parenthesis, again, you’ll see the average number of pages viewed per visitor. This statistic is interesting enough but not very useful. And again, it does not tell you how many people have visited your site!

The number under the turquoise header tells you the number of hits. This is the most misunderstood statistic ever. A “hit” means that one file has been loaded. So, let’s say that you have a page with a total of 20 images. Including the page file itself, when one visitor loads this page, it results in 21 hits. When five people load it, that’s 105 hits. And so on and so forth. Basically, this number is useless. It’s huge, and it tells you nothing. And it is not–I repeat, not–the number of people who have visited your Web site. I can’t emphasize this point strongly enough.

There are a lot of statistics programs out there, a lot of different ways for a program to read the traffic information it collects from the server. I’ve come across way too many that are very confusing, which is why I love AWStats and prefer hosts that offer it. But despite the difficulty sometimes in understanding these numbers, one part remains a fact: If someone tells you they had 50,000 hits last month/last week/whatever, then they’re talking about the number of files accessed–not the number of visitors. Because very, very few Web sites get that kind of traffic.