In this article we explore the basic metrics used to measure website traffic.

Visits or Sessions

Every time a user lands on your website, the visit counter is incremented. If they leave and come back later, the counter is incremented again. For a physical store, visits would correspond to the total number of customers who walked through the door during a given period.

Most analytics tools allow you to define the minimum time between two visits from the same user. The visit counter will not be incremented during this window, even if the visitor has left your site. By default, the minimum time between two visits is 30 minutes in Google Analytics and one hour in AFS Analytics. AFS Analytics lets you set this duration freely.

Page Views

The page view counter is incremented each time a user loads a page on your site. Using our physical store analogy, this would correspond to the number of aisles visited by the customer. You can gauge visitors' interest in your content by calculating the average pages viewed per visit (page views / visits).

Unique Visitors

Unique visitors is a slightly more complex metric to understand. This counter is only incremented on the visitor's first visit during a defined period. If no period is specified, it refers to the daily unique visitor count.

a. Daily Unique Visitors
This indicator shows the number of different users who visited the site on a given day.

b. Monthly Unique Visitors
This is the number of different users who visited the site during a given month.

c. Annual Unique Visitors
This indicates the number of different users who visited the site during a given year. For a physical store, the monthly unique visitor count would correspond to the number of different customers welcomed by the store during that month.

Conclusion

AFS Analytics provides all of this data along with a detailed breakdown by date — meaning you can know the number of daily, monthly, or annual unique visitors for any period you select.