Most website owners know about the usefulness of analytics in their websites and PPC online advertising campaigns but often read their reports wrong. They get confused with the plethora of buzzwords such as visits, pageviews, unique pageviews, clicks, and visitors. Here is a guide that will help them understand the difference between clicks and visits and the other buzzwords:

Clicks and Visitors

When a person clicks on the advertisement, it is considered as 1 click. If the same person clicks on a PPC ad 5 times, it is considered as 5 clicks. When the person lands up on your website after clicking on your ad, it is considered as 1 visitor. Each visitor is tracked on the basis of uniqueness. So, if the person who has clicked on your advertisement 5 times lands up on your website 5 times, the analytics will consider it as 1 visitor.

So, the number of clicks will not tally with the number of visitors because of the following reasons:

1. A visitor may click multiple times on the same ad and all his clicks will be counted. But when he lands up on all those multiple times on the website the website analytics software will consider him as 1 visitor.
2. The person who clicks on the ad may bookmark the site and return later. When he returns later, the advertisement analytics will not record another click because he did not click on the ad to reach the website in the 2^nd instance (this holds true for his future direct visits too).
3. If the visitor clicks on the ad 1 time or multiple times, and stops the webpage from loading, then the advertisement analytics software will register all the clicks but the website analytics may not register a visit.

Visits and visitors

It is very important to understand the difference between visits and visitors. A visitor is considered as a unique entity by the analytics software. If 1 visitor visits your website every day for 30 days and spends 1 hour on it continuously and daily, the analytics software will report him as 1 visitor for that 30 day period.

A Visit represents an individual session. The length of an individual session is defined in the analytics software.

Let’s take an example: IF a Search Engine has programmed each individual session to last 10 minutes, and if 1 person uses that search engine continuously for 1 hour, then the analytics tool will count it as 6 visits (60 minutes divided by 10). So, if that person searches daily on that search engine and spends 1 hour on his search, then the analytics tool will total his visits as 180 (6 visits daily X 30 days) and his unique visitor count as 1 for a 30-day period.

If he searches on Google for 2 minutes and returns within 5 minutes for another search, his number of visits will still be counted as 1 because the repeat visit happened within the 10-minute individual session period. If he searches on Google for 2 minutes and returns for another search after 20 minutes, then the analytics tool will count it as 2 visits, and so on.

Pageviews and Unique Pageviews

A pageview is the number of times a page has been viewed.  If one visitor views your page 100 times in a day or even in a short span of time, the analytics toll will count it as 100 pageviews.

Unique pageviews refer to the number of times that a page has been viewed in an individual session. So, if 1 user viewed 1 page 3 times in 3 individual sessions it will be considered as 3 unique pageviews; if he views 1 page 3 times in 1 individual session, then it will be counted as 1 unique pageview.

This is how to differentiate between clicks, visits, visitors and pageviews.