Web statistics question - sites vs visits

[fbrdphreak]

So I'm a little confused. I googled and found the definitions behind sites and visits, I know visits is the pertinent number and refers to your unique visitors for the day.

But here's the odd thing: over the past couple days we've had slightly elevated number of visits, but the "sites" has been WAY over that of visits; as in the number of "sites" has been 5-6 times that of the visits. How is that possible?

Sites is the number of unique IP addresses/hostnames that made requests to the server. Care should be taken when using this metric for anything other than that. Many users can appear to come from a single site, and they can also appear to come from many ip addresses so it should be used simply as a rough guage as to the number of visitors to your server.

Visits occur when some remote site makes a request for a page on your server for the first time. As long as the same site keeps making requests within a given timeout period, they will all be considered part of the same Visit. If the site makes a request to your server, and the length of time since the last request is greater than the specified timeout period (default is 30 minutes), a new Visit is started and counted, and the sequence repeats. Since only pages will trigger a visit, remotes sites that link to graphic and other non- page URLs will not be counted in the visit totals, reducing the number of false visits.

 

[fbrdphreak]

C'mon folks, no one knows about this stuff?

 

[fbrdphreak]

C'mon people, someone has to be able to explain this!! Slackers!!!!!!!!!

 

[Tobolo]

Um Visit is anytime a computer accesses your site and Sites are the hosts (IE Bellsouth or AOHell Server)

I think. We do ours diferently.

 

[jfall]

urchin ftw