Understanding the world of Google Analytics can be a bit confusing. Web Statistics can be a universe unto itself; but if we view it as the fabled elephant and take it one bite at a time, we can slowly begin to unravel the mystery.

A great example is the difference between Page Views and Page Visits. When a person sits at his computer and pulls up your site, it is called a Visit. The moment he first lands on your page, Google Analytics assigns a specific date/time stamp with an ID. This is stored as a “cookie” on his machine. As long as he is actively looking/clicking on your site, it is still considered one visit. Let’s say that during this visit the phone rings and the visitor gets distracted. He has stopped clicking through your site. The statistics “times out” the visit after 30 minutes of inactivity. This means it stops tracking the visit and has ended it. Once the visitor returns to viewing/clicking your site, it recognizes the “cookie” and begins a new visit. In this example, you can see how one person can actually count for several visits, all in the same day.

In comparison, a Page View is anytime that same person clicks a page on your site during a visit. For instance, the visitor clicks your Home Page, then the About Us page, then goes back to the Home Page. This counts for 3 page views.

One person can create several Page Views within a Visit. For the above example, at the end of the day, our visitor would be tracked as having made 2 visits, and 3 page views. It is easy to imagine, using this given example, how many page views can be counted during one visit, and also how many visits one person may be counted for.

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