When we set up a blog or a website for our clients, we install Google Analytics. This program runs in the background and collects information about your visitors.

Google Analytics counts the number of visits to your site in a day, week or month, and the number of unique visitors in that time period. They can tell you the duration of visitors on your site, how long they spent viewing each page, and much more.

Years ago, many people ran a “hits” counter, but hits do not tell you anything useful about your visitors. A hit refers to a single file on a webpage, but most web pages have several files: one for the page itself and one for every banner, ad and image on the page. One web page might have 20 files; another page might have 2 or 3. Additional hidden files include templates and style sheet files.

When people visit your site, all the files making up each of your web pages are delivered to their computers. The browsers they use (such as Internet Explorer or Safari) arrange your files so visitors can see your pages as your designer intended.

A “hit” counter just counts up all the files people download when they connect to your site. Person A might view just your homepage with 5 files on it. Person B might visit your homepage plus two more pages – each of which has a different number of files on it. Person C might look at every page and dozens of pictures. A hit counter counts the number of files that were downloaded by all of your visitors – each of whom viewed a different number of pages with a different number of files on each page – and gives you one big total.

Unique visitors, on the other hand, is a count of the number of individual people who visited your site on a given day, week or month. If your sister visits your site 10 times from the same computer, she is still only counted as one unique visitor.

Unique visitors are the best indicator of your website’s performance.