Impressions, Hits, Page views, Uniques ?? - Website/blog Traffic Terms

If you are having a blog you must have surely heard of these terms. You may have browsed some forum in which webmasters saying that my website recieves 1 million page views per month, some saying I get 3,000 uniques per day etc. So, what are these?? The impressions, Hits, Page views and uniques are different web traffic terms used for measuring traffic of a website or a blog. In This post I will let you know what are these and what do they actually mean. Before going to the meaning of all these terms let us first know there importance- What is their use? If you are a webmaster (owner of a website or a blog)  you must understand these terms. It will be beneficial to provide demographics to your advertisers and also will let you to know about your own traffic.

Impressions:

 Impressions are the number of loads of a particular element of your website. They are usually counted in 1000s. Thus if a advertiser is paying you 1$ for 1000 impressions that means that you will get 1$ if the ad is loaded 1000 times.

Hits:

Hits are now-a-days rarely used to calculate a website's traffic. Hits can be said as the requests (sent from a single page loaded from a server) to the browser to load a particular element. For eg. If a website contains 10 images, 5 videos, 3 ads then the total numbers of these will be 18 hits (one request for each element). Hits usually returns a large number and are not so accurate and thus are useless now.

Page views:

As the name suggests it is the number of pages a visitor views when he visits a website/blog. For example : If a visitors visits a particular page of your website/blog (eg homepage) and then visits another page (eg about or contact page). Then the numbers of visitor will be one but the number of page views will be two.

Uniques:

Uniques can be said as the number of unique (different visitors i.e visits coming from different IPs) visitors that visits you site and are the most accurate regarding the actual traffic of your site/blog. 

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