I was looking at magento site statistics.

  • In the website itself it shows: 550 visitors/day
  • On Stack Exchange it shows: 550 visits/day
  • On Area51 it shows: 570 visits/day

At first glance, x visitors/day would mean that there are x unique visitors that visit a website. While x visits would mean that there is an unknown amount of people who visited the website x times in total.

Since the numbers are almost the same, I'd guess visitors/day and visits are the same. But which meaning is the correct one?

migrated from discuss.area51.stackexchange.com Apr 3 '13 at 13:10



A "visitor" is an individual person using the site. Regardless of how much activity they indulge in, it is considered one "visit." Visitors and visits are synonymous.

The term you are missing (the activity from an "unknown amount of people") is called "views." Views are how much folks are actually looking at the site (i.e. how many pages all the users viewed in total). That statistic isn't reported on that page.

  • 4
    Why not call them the same everywhere, I think it would remove this confusion? – Dan Apr 3 '13 at 13:09

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