Yesterday (11/22/2005) my site was switched to the new version of Smarter Stats that features 3D graphs and a new UI.

I created a custom report using the new system and need some some help understanding one of the tables. I asked for "views per visit" as one of my choices for the custom report and the response is somewhat baffling. According to Smarter Stats, my site recorded 351 "Visits" with 0 "Page Views". I looked into this using the online help function and it contains this statement:

"Page Views - A page view is a successful request for a file on your web site that is considered to be a page. These usually mean files with extensions such as .txt, .asp, .aspx, .php, etc. Views generated as a result of an error (either a 400 or 500 level error) are not counted as actual views for your site, and are kept separate from successful views."

If a "Page View" as reported in the table is a "successful" request for a file, does the statistic indicate that someone started to dowload a page and bailed out or something else? If you have some insight into this issue, I would appreciate your helping me to understand the issues involved.

Thanks,

Visits - Visits represent the total number of times people have visited your web site. A visit is counted whenever a web site user requests one or more files from the web server. If the user becomes idle for more than a certain amount of time (usually 20 minutes), a new visit is generated when they come back.

Page Views - A page view is a successful request for a file on your web site that is considered to be a page. These usually mean files with extensions such as .txt, .asp, .aspx, .php, etc. Views generated as a result of an error (either a 400 or 500 level error) are not counted as actual views for your site, and are kept separate from successful views.

How many pages do you have on your site? If you just have a homepage up or your entire site is on one page than the stats do sound accurate since the visit records the visit to the site while page views records when they goto a few pages on your site.

Connie:

Thank you for your thoughtful response.

I am concerned with these statistics because they may be telling me something important about the design of my site. I am asking questions to help me understand what the numbers really mean and what I might be able to do about it. As a consequence, your information led to some additional observations.

The site in question has over 1,500 pages, so the explanation you provided in the last paragraph of your response would, presumably, not apply.

Smarter Stats reported 351 Visits with 0 Page Views. In addition, there were a large number of Visits with single (1) or multiple page views (various numbers) but I am interested in finding out about "the 351 visits with 0 page views".

Based on the definitions you provided, I have this observation. Since recording a "visit" depends on successfullydownloading at least one file (if not more than one), then each of the 351 "visits", which I mentioned in my first note, should have been reported as having downloaded at least one file. I noticed that the type of file was not defined in your definition, as it is for page views (and Smarter Stats does not define it in the help section of Smarter Stats). Is it possible that the use of the word "file" here includes types of files not included in the definition of page view (e.g. JPEG, GIF)?

You indicate (and I believe correctly) that a page view is a successful request for a file that is considered to be a page. My site consists mostly of html files (.htm) but each page has, usually, several JPEG or GIF files. Is it possible that the statistic is telling me that these "visits" downloaded a JPEG file and bailed out before the HTM file downloaded?

Thanks again for your help.

Just received a helpful note from Kendall Patterson of HostMySite. He indicated that the likely explanation of visits without page views is spidering of the site by search engines. I had not thought about that possibility but, in retrospect, it sounds right. Thanks everyone.

You can also create and apply some filters if you can find out where those spiders are coming from.