” I bought 1000 clicks solo ads but my platform Dashboard says i only Got 800 Visits! you didn’t send me all my traffic !! ” We all been there as traffic vendors 🙂 and many reading this post also have been there as buyers 🙂 …
Apple & Orange …
it’s amazing to take a step back and look at the confusion of different people that are using traffic analytics solutions/tracking solutions.
Every analytics solution comes with its own warehouse of terminology that may sound foreign to most. A common area of confusion that I’ve seen with non-analysts centers specifically around Visitors, Visits, Pageviews, Entrances, and Clicks.
Don’t feel bad if you’re one of them – several of these sound similar, and all are related to each other in some way. We’ve all been there at one point. That’s why we need to look out for each other!
Definitions of hits, clicks, visits, visitors, page views:
Hits – The number of files your website serves. Every time your CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) loads, every time each image on your website loads, each time your php or html files load, all these count as 1 hit. So if a website has a lot of these items on its home page, a single page view of that home page may generate 40 hits. And if a website has very few items, a single view may only generate 20 hits.
A Click (The main Focus as a solo ads sellers & Buyer) is a term generally used in connection with campaigns because the most important information is – how many clicks did a particular solo ad campaign generated. Solo Ads Clicks are Clicks Generated on the Seller Side First, As they all use professional Tracking system, Like Clickmagick, So Clicks are generated First on the seller Side and Redirected to the offer link that the buyer is promoting…
Visits or Visitors – The number of visits to your website. A single unique visitor could be responsible for many if about an hour passes between them taking action (eg they leave your website open on a tab in their browser and forget about it until they click on it an hour later).
Unique Visitors – The number of individuals who have visited your website. But, if a person on a dial-up connection disconnects and reconnects, they will be assigned a different IP address and therefore be counted as another unique visitor if they return to your website.
Page Views – The number of web pages your website serves. So a single visitor may go back to your home page several times, or refresh a page, each instance counts as another page view.
Let’s Dig a bit More …
Clicks vs. Visits:
There is an important distinction between clicks and visits (in your Search Engines and Visitors report in your affiliate dashboard). The clicks column in your reports indicates how many times your advertisements were clicked by visitors, while visits indicates the number of unique sessions initiated by your visitors. There are several reasons why these two numbers may not match:
- A visitor may click your ad multiple times. When one person clicks on one advertisement multiple times in the same session, Clickmagick for ex will record multiple clicks while Analytics recognizes the separate page views as one visit.
- A user may click on an ad and then later, during a different session, return directly to the site through a bookmark. The referral information from the original visit will be retained in this case, so the one click will result in multiple visits.
- A visitor may click on your advertisement, but prevent the page from fully loading by navigating to another page or by pressing their browser’s Stop button. In this case, the Analytics tracking code is unable to execute and send tracking data to the Google servers. However, Clickmagick will still register a click.
To ensure more accurate billing and clean traffic, Clickmagick automatically filters invalid clicks from your reports. See How Clickmagick Cleans and define bad from good clicks
Visits vs. Visitors vs. Absolute Unique Visitors
Analytics measures both visits and visitors in your account. Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.
A Visitor is a construct designed to come as close as possible to defining the number of actual, distinct people who visited a website. There is of course no way to know if two people are sharing a computer from the website’s perspective, but a good visitor-tracking system can come close to the actual number. The most accurate visitor-tracking systems generally employ cookies to maintain tallies of distinct visitors.
‘Visitors’ represents the number of unique users that visit your site on a daily basis. Any sessions from the same user on the same day will be aggregated into a single visitor, but may represent two or more separate visits.
In the Absolute Unique Visitor report, all visits from the same user for the entire active date range you have selected will be aggregated so that they will be counted as a single absolute unique visitor, regardless of how many different days they visited your site and how many times they visited your site on each day
Page Views vs. Unique Page Views
- A page view is defined as a view of a page on your site that is being tracked by the Analytics tracking code. If a visitor hits reload after reaching the page, this will be counted as an additional page view. If a user navigates to a different page and then returns to the original page, a second page view will be recorded as well.
- A unique page view, as seen in the Top Content report, aggregates page views that are generated by the same user during the same session. A unique page view represents the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.
There are allot more technical data that dig even deeper into this topic, but i hope this post covers the main points and fix the few confusions that some might have …
Thank you …
Mark Elali
