web page number of visits

Page Views vs. Visits: What's The Difference? We Break It Down

Published: December 29, 2021

When it comes to your website reporting, it’s important to know exactly what you’re tracking and what the metric means.

If you’re using HubSpot’s Marketing Analytics tool , you may have noticed the following metrics in your dashboard: page views, page visits, page sessions. So what’s the difference between these three? Let’s dive in.

Understanding Page Views vs. Visits

A page view occurs when a page on your website is loaded or reloaded whether the user was already on your page or came from an external page. A page visit, on the other hand, only occurs when someone lands on your site from an external page, such as Google or another website.

So technically, every page visit is a page view, but the same is not true the other way around.

It’s important to know this difference, as it can greatly impact your understanding of audience behavior and page performance.

Without this knowledge, you might think that high page views is an indicator of a high-performing website but that’s not always the case. You’ll need to look at more metrics, like page sessions, unique page views, page visits, and other metrics to get a full picture.

Now that we broke that down, we’re going to further explain each metric in detail. Before we get there, it’s important to understand what a session is, as that can help your understanding of other website metrics.

What is a session?

A session is a measurement of visitor engagement that groups together analytics activities taken by a single visitor on your website. It expires after 30 minutes of inactivity.

It works by grouping together the actions taken by visitors as they navigate through your site. This includes the pages they are viewing, the elements they engage with (Think CTAs, forms, or events.)

The time-sensitive element of a session allows you to drill into engagement and traffic on your site.

Here’s an example: A visitor lands on your website’s homepage by clicking on a link from a blog post. They spend some time scrolling down the page, navigating to your product page, and even reading your "About Us" page. Then, they decide to leave the website.

Ten minutes later, the same visitor is still thinking about your product and decides to return directly to your pricing page. All of these actions would count as one session.

Even though the visitor completely left your site, they have not been inactive for more than 30 minutes, so the second visit to your website is recorded as a continuation of their original engagement to your site. If the visitor chose to return after that session has elapsed, their visit would kick off a new session.

How to Understand the Page Views of a Website

A page view is when a page on your site is loaded by a browser.

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9 Free Tools to Check Any Site’s Website Traffic

These are the best website traffic checker tools to find out how much traffic a website gets.

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Top 9 Free Website Traffic Checker Tools

How do website traffic checkers work, important website traffic metrics to analyze, how to analyze your website’s traffic, key learnings.

Do you want to know how many visitors a website gets? Website traffic checkers are tools that allow you to analyze the traffic of any website around the world.

These are the best tools to check website traffic for any site for free.

• SEO PowerSuite
• Sitechecker Pro
• UberSuggest

Semrush is a comprehensive suite of marketing solutions for online businesses. The platform offers a robust set of tools for everything from backlink analysis and content planning to SEO audits and ranking tracking.

One such tool is their Traffic Analytics solution, which can be used to check competitor website traffic.

Semrush has both paid and free versions. With the free version of Semrush’s Traffic Analytics , you can view up to 10 traffic overview reports a day.

The overview tab will provide important metrics for the website you are analyzing, including:

• Total visits
• Unique visitors
• Pages per visit
• Average visit duration
• Bounce rate

There is a feature called Bulk Traffic Analysis that enables you to check the traffic for multiple websites at once. You can add up to 200 websites to compile data into a single report, which can then be exported to .csv.

You can gain even more insights from additional traffic reports, including:

• Audience Insights: See which websites the users of a competitor’s site also visit to better understand their audience.
• Traffic Journey: Discover how competitors gain their website visitors and see who their top referring sites are. You can also see the top destinations visitors progress after leaving the competitor’s website.
• Top Pages: Gain insights into what is working best for a website with a report of its top-performing pages. You can also see which products or services the business is promoting and the channels it is using for promotions.
• Geo Distribution: See the geographic locations driving the majority of a website’s traffic and analyze how user behavior varies between countries.

With the free version of Semrush, you can only see a sample of the data in the report. For example, in the Top Pages tab, you can only see the first 10 results for the website you are analyzing.

You’ll get started by providing your email, phone number, and password to create an account. Next, you’ll provide your billing information, which will be used to set up your recurring payments. You won’t be charged when you submit the information, and your trial will begin.

For 14 days you’ll have access to Semrush full suite of 50 marketing tools to help grow your business. If you don’t wish to continue your plan once the trial has ended you can simply cancel your plan at any time during the 14-day period.

Check Website Traffic with Semrush

2. SERanking

SERanking is an all-in-one SEO solution that allows users to research keywords, track rankings, and check the website traffic of sites around the world.

When you search for a website you’ll get a quick overview of the site’s total organic and paid traffic per month as well as the total number of keywords the site is ranking for.

Further down the results page, you will find line graphs showing the trend of total traffic and ranking keywords and how they progress over time.

SERanking also provides a list of all the website’s ranking keywords, top-performing pages, and a breakdown of its main organic and paid competitors.

Like other solutions on this list, the amount of data you can view in the free version is limited.

For example, with the organic keywords and top-page reports, only the top ten results are visible.

SERanking has three paid plans starting at $39 per month.

There is no credit card required for sign-up, as users only need to provide their name, email, phone number, and password to get started.

Check Website Traffic with SERanking

3. SerpStat

Serpstat is a suite of SEO solutions that has grown from a simple keyword research tool to now provide users with a more comprehensive set of features to understand their website’s performance.

This includes backlink analysis, rank tracking, site auditing, and traffic checking for other websites.

The platform comes in both free and paid versions. Before using the free version of SerpStat you must create an account by providing an email address, phone number, and password.

After creating your account, you can use the search field on the homepage to enter any website and begin analyzing its traffic.

The results page will give many valuable insights, including:

• Keywords: A list of the paid and SEO keywords that are driving traffic to the site. For the organic keywords, you can see how many queries are new, how many have been lost, and how many have improved their ranking.
• Visibility: An index that measures how often the website appears in search results for the keywords that it is ranking for. Higher visibility tends to indicate a higher level of traffic.
• Traffic Trend: A line graph showing the number of visitors the website receives per month. You can toggle the graph to show the year-to-date or all-time statistics.
• Keywords Trend: A line graph showing how users’ interest in the site’s ranking keywords has changed over time.
• Top Pages: A list of the pages driving the most traffic to the website from organic search results. For each page, you can see all the keywords for which that page ranks in the top 50 of Google’s search results.

The results provided by the free version are only a sample of the available data. The free version also does not allow for searching and filtering of the results.

Serpstat does not offer a free trial upon signing up for any of its plans.

That being said, the free version provides enough functionality for you to get a good feel for the solution before committing to a paid plan.

Check Website Traffic With SerpStat

4. SEO PowerSuite

SEO PowerSuite is a comprehensive SEO software suite that provides various tools to help improve website rankings. The suite comprises four distinct tools, namely Rank Tracker, WebSite Auditor, SEO SpyGlass, and LinkAssistant.

Rank Tracker enables users to track their website’s search engine rankings across multiple keywords and search engines. The tool generates detailed reports on keyword rankings and offers insights into competitors’ keyword and traffic data.

To access organic traffic statistics in Rank Tracker, click on the Competitor Research module and select Domain Competitors. Then, enter any URL to view its keywords and traffic, as well as the top 100 search competitors.

WebSite Auditor provides a comprehensive on-page SEO analysis, including meta tags and header tags, and recommends ways to enhance website performance.

SEO SpyGlass offers insights into a website’s backlink profile, enabling users to identify link-building opportunities and enhance their website’s overall search engine performance.

LinkAssistant helps users find relevant websites for link building and provides recommendations for outreach opportunities.

SEO PowerSuite offers various pricing plans, with the cheapest starting at $299 per year. The software also provides a free version with some feature limitations. Sign-up does not require a credit card, as users only need their name and email to get started.

Check Website Traffic with SEO PowerSuite

5. Sitechecker Pro

Sitechecker is an SEO solution with various tools designed to help businesses improve their search performance.

The platform’s most prominent features are the Website Audit, Site Monitoring, Rank Tracker, and Backlink Tracker tools, which are all part of its paid pricing plans.

However, it provides several free tools, including its Traffic Checker, which can be used to check the website traffic of any domain you provide.

To use the tool, simply visit SiteChecker and type the name of the website you want to analyze. You’ll be asked to provide an email address to start your 14-day free trial.

After registering, you will find plenty of useful insights to gauge the site’s performance and better understand its strategy.

Some of the helpful traffic reports include:

• Traffic overview: A graph showing the total traffic volume over the past 6 months.
• Engagement: Important metrics for measuring site performance, including overall visits per month, average visit duration, average page visits, and bounce rate.
• Traffic by countries: A breakdown of how much and what percentage of traffic comes from different countries.
• Traffic by sources: See how much traffic comes from each channel along with its percentage of total traffic.
• Top keywords: A list of the top five paid and organic keywords that lead visitors to the site.

You also have the option to connect your Google Analytics and Google Search Console accounts and get the data about your site traffic and sales (if you have E-Commerce in GA) in the same dashboard.

Unlike some of the other solutions on this list, all the data from Sitechecker’s Traffic Checker is available for free. If, however, you want to take advantage of the other tools offered by Sitechecker, plans start at $41 per month.

Check Website Traffic with SiteChecker

6. Similar Web

Similar Web is a traffic intelligence solution built to provide users with a detailed analysis of any website’s visitors.

While some of the other companies on this list offer a range of SEO and marketing tools, Similar Web focuses singularly on website traffic analysis.

When you search for a website, you’ll get insights broken into the following sections:

• Traffic Overview: The Traffic Overview shows the global, country, and category rank for the website’s traffic. It also provides basic engagement stats such as average visit duration, pages per visit, and bounce rate as well as a geographic breakdown of the website’s traffic along with its top traffic sources.
• Referrals: See which websites are sending traffic to the site as well as the most popular exit destination when visitors leave the site.
• Search: A detailed analysis of the website’s top-performing paid and organic keywords
• Social: See which social channels are driving the most traffic to the website.
• Display Advertising: A list of the publishers and ad networks the website uses for display advertising.
• Audience: Find out which other categories the website’s audience is interested in. Audience Insights also gives a list of the other websites most visited by the site’s users.
• Competitors: A list of the website’s close competitors and other similar sites.

Similar provides both free and paid versions of its platform.

If you want access to the full data set, SimilarWeb offers plans centered around search, display, and affiliate marketing. There is also an enterprise plan fully equipped with all the features from each plan.

There is a free trial available, but it is only for 7 days, so I recommend that you plan how you want to test the solution in advance to be able to make the most of it.

Check Website Traffic With SimilarWeb

WebCEO is a robust suite of SEO tools designed for agencies and individuals looking to manage multiple projects in a single solution.

WebCEO is different from the other tools on this list in that it does not allow you to search for another website’s traffic data directly.

Instead, users create a project with their own website and then use the Competitor Metrics tool to analyze the traffic of related sites.

The platform pulls data from Alexa to provide traffic statistics from your website’s closest competitors.

This enables you to see these websites’ traffic over time, average ranking position, and shared keywords.

There isn’t a free version of the service and you will have to sign up for a plan to be able to use it.

A credit card is not required to sign up as you can simply provide your personal information and get started right away.

The free trial provides access to all 21 of WebCEO’s SEO tools.

Check Website Traffic with WebCEO

8. UberSuggest

Ubersuggest is an SEO solution designed to help users perform keyword research, plan their content marketing, and check competitor website traffic.

The platform comes in both free and paid versions.

The free version of Ubersuggest allows you to search for three websites a day.

To see a website’s traffic, type the domain into the search field on the Ubersuggest homepage.

The results page will show a quick overview of the website’s traffic, including the total number of organic keywords the site ranks for as well as its total monthly organic traffic.

You will also find a list of the website’s top SEO pages and keywords.

Other modules, including a historical view of the site’s traffic and keyword ranking data, are only accessible with a paid plan.

Three paid plans are designed for individuals, small businesses, and agencies.

Prices start at $29 a month however, there is the potential to save considerably by signing up for a lifetime plan with a one-time fee.

The trial grants full access to all of Ubersugest’s features, and a credit card is required at signup.

Check Website Traffic with UberSuggest

Ahrefs is another popular option to check website traffic for free. Visit the Ahrefs website traffic checker page and enter the domain you want to analyze. You don’t have to register or create an account. The service is completely free.

Entering a domain will give you a nice compact report showing the total organic traffic, the traffic value, top countries, top organic keywords, and the top pages.

Ahrefs is a great SEO marketing tool but to get more traffic insights, you need to register for a paid plan. Pricing starts at $99 monthly for the ‘Lite’ plan and extends to $179 for the ‘Standard Plan’.

Check Website Traffic with Ahrefs

Website traffic checkers use a variety of sources to collect data, including web crawlers, ISPs, and browser extensions, among others.

A lot of data is needed to give an accurate picture of a website’s performance which is why you may find that smaller sites do not show up when you search for them in a traffic checker.

But for websites with a steady amount of traffic, site checker tools can prove an essential asset for planning and growing your business.

So, what should you look for when analyzing a website’s traffic?

There are several important metrics that give great insight into a website’s performance and the strategies the business is using.

Important website traffic metrics to analyze include:

• Unique visitors: The number of people who visited a website at least once in a given period.
• Pageviews : The total number of pages viewed on a website within a given period.
• Organic search traffic : The number of people who arrive at a website from a search engine search.
• Average visit duration: The average amount of time each visitor spends on a website.
• Bounce Rate : The percentage of visitors that leave a website without viewing a second page.
• Top traffic sources: The online channels that drive the most visitors to the site.

The tools we have covered answer the question of how to check the website traffic of competitors. However, it is just as important to increase your website traffic , and the first step is to monitor it continually.

There are several free solutions available to analyze your website’s traffic.

Google Analytics

One of the most popular among them is Google Analytics. The platform provides extensive reports that you can use to track traffic sources and user behavior on your site.

It lets you see your visitors’ demographic characteristics like age and gender, where they live, and how they found your website.

To use Google Analytics, you must add a simple tracking code to your website. If you have a WordPress site, there are several plugins available to simplify the process.

Google Analytics can integrate with some of the tools mentioned on this list, allowing you to connect your website data to a more comprehensive solution to view alongside competitors.

Google Search Console

Another helpful free tool to analyze your website’s traffic is Google Search Console .

Google Search Console is essentially a hub for managing how the search engine treats your website. You can see which pages are included in the index and if Google’s crawlers have any errors when finding your site .

The platform provides a comprehensive list of the keywords your site ranks for, and you can track performance over time to see how your rankings are changing and which pages drive the most traffic to your website.

Checking another website’s traffic is a great way to learn what works for them and can be useful in growing your business.

When checking a website’s traffic, it is important to analyze the following metrics:

• Organic search traffic
• Average visit duration:
• Top traffic sources

Website traffic checkers are tools that allow you to analyze the traffic of any website.

There are plenty of free site checker tools available to analyze a website’s performance. My top solutions include:

Some of these tools also have paid versions and will limit the amount of information you can see with the free version. Most offer some form of free trial for you to test the solution before committing to a paid plan.

While it is important to analyze your competitors’ traffic, it is also essential to analyze your own. You can use free tools like Google Analytics to monitor your website’s traffic and understand user behavior.

Overall, checking other websites’ traffic is an important part of building effective strategies for your business.

Take a look at the tools we’ve discussed in this post and see how they work for you.

Alex Chris is a digital marketing consultant, author, and instructor. He has more than 18 years of practical experience with SEO and digital marketing. Alex holds an MSc Degree in eCommerce and has consulted with Fortune 500 companies in different industries. He blogs regularly about SEO and Digital marketing, and his work has been referenced by leading marketing websites. Connect with Alex on Twitter and LinkedIn .

December 15, 2020 at 8:09 pm

TY! great resources.

April 28, 2022 at 3:39 pm

Thanks a lot Halina!

December 20, 2020 at 1:27 pm

The tools we have covered answer the question of how to check the website traffic of competitors. However, it is just as important to continually monitor your own website’s traffic.

April 28, 2022 at 3:40 pm

Yes, that’s true. To check the traffic of your own website, the best tools are Google Analytics and Google Search Console (as explained in the article).

Thanks a lot Alex

April 9, 2022 at 9:38 am

SemRush is my favorite. I think it’s the best tool vs pricing to compare with other like Similar web.

April 28, 2022 at 3:42 pm

I agree, Semrush is a great tool for checking a website’s traffic and for a lot of other functions.

Thanks for commenting. Alex

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Home » Web Tutorials » SEO » 5 Ways to Find Number of Visitors to a Website

5 Ways to Find Number of Visitors to a Website

Generally web traffic is defined in two terms for a specific period – page views and unique visits. The number of unique human visitors who visits a website is referred as unique visits while the total pages viewed is called page views. This shouldn’t include bots that crawl your website for various purposes, such as for search engine ranking and data gathering. There are many tools that you can use to find insights of the traffic data of a website. Using these tools, you can get an approximate amount of visitors that any website is attracting for a specific period of time.

Related: How to find number pages on a website?

Fortunately, these tools are easy to use and you can use these tools to analyze your competitors . You will know how much traffic prominent websites in your niche get. It’s easier to know what works and what doesn’t, after you add new features to your website. It will be helpful for marketers, SEO specialists and website administrators to get accurate information about daily, weekly or monthly sessions that a website is getting. These tools could also provide information about current top keywords in specific niche. By using these keywords, you can drive more traffic to your website.

There are other metrics that you can measure with these tools, such as page views per visit, time spend on a webpage, bounce rate and others. Because there are many traffic estimation tools out there, you should choose the one that works best for you.

How to Find Traffic Data of A Website?

Use the below tools to find traffic data, that is number of visitors to a website:

• Semrush – any website
• SimilarWeb – any website
• Google Analytics – for site owners
• Quantcast – for site owners
• Alexa – any website (retired)

1. Semrush – Any Website

Semrush is also known for its exceptional accuracy and it’s a reliable tool to check the traffic of a website. It has a trend following among the webmasters and bloggers community. If you know how to utilize Semrush, you should be able to derive plenty of value from it. Go to Semrush site, enter the site URL in search box, choose the country and hit enter. The domain overview will show the details of traffic on desktop and mobile devices.

Semrush provides you with a list of ranked keywords and key phrases. You can use this information to effectively improve the number of unique visitors. Free users can get basic data, while the paid version offers you full analysis of the traffic that you website and competitors are getting. For commercial website owners and professional bloggers, the paid version is all worth it. You can immediately make crucial decisions that have an effect on your incoming traffic.

Semrush also offer a new Traffic Analytics tool that will help you to find the traffic details of your competitors. You can register for a free account to get 10 traffic overview reports per day. You can use this tool to find how many visitors are viewing your competitor’s site to improve your site’s performance.

Related: How to find last updated date of a webpage?

2. SimilarWeb – Any Website

Go to SimilarWeb website, enter any site URL in the search box and hit enter. You will see detailed traffic analysis for the previous month. This includes ranking, sources, total visits, traffic by countries and more. Go to the traffic overview section which will show you the approximate number of visitors for the past six months.

SimilarWeb is a useful tool for new bloggers, because it breaks down traffic sources based on different factors, such as device used and keywords. Paid version of SimilarWeb offers even more information, including mobile app engagement, campaign effectiveness benchmark, most popular pages and others. SimilarWeb collects data with browser extensions and toolbars, so information can be obtained from a sample of users. However, accuracy could depend on your categories.

3. Google Analytics [For Site Owners]

Google Analytics is the most popular website analysis tool on the planet. Almost every site uses Analytics tag to track traffic and other data. You should login and register your site with Analytics. A tracking code needs to be installed on your site to get the traffic data inside your Analytics account. Learn more about Google Analytics .

4. Quantcast [For Site Owners]

When you use Quantcast , information is displayed nicely and easy to follow. But you should signup and install the Quantcast tag on your site to use the service. It includes a useful media planner tool and some demographic information. However, Quantcast lacks enough information for websites with small traffic. Although the data may not be reliable for smaller website, it still provides some good information. Its demographics data can be used as references for many website owners and SEO professionals. Quantcast is free, so this is a good enough incentive for new bloggers.

Related: How to find number of backlinks to a webpage?

5. Alexa – Any Website (Retired)

The free Alexa tool does not show the estimated number of visitors. But it shows the global rank and country rank in which the site is popular. This will give you an overview of traffic comparing to any other website. You can use “https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/domain-name” to find the traffic details of any website. Ensure to replace the “domain-name” with the site name you want to find the traffic data.

The premium version of Alexa is also useful for comparing traffic and general trends of multiple websites. It’s known for massive index when comparing different websites in a niche. However, Alexa isn’t so great for small websites and if you get fewer visitors each month, you won’t get any useful information. In some cases, a website with fewer visits has higher Alexa rank than those with higher visits. This is enough to question the reliability of the service. Although Alexa is useful for predicting future trends of a website, you may not be able to make any real use of the charts, in some situations. Note that Alexa retired their both free and premium services effective from 1st May 2022.

Traffic analysis is important for business professionals, website owners, administrators, marketers and SEO specialists. Fortunately, traffic estimator and analysis service doesn’t have to cost a fortune, especially for new bloggers. You can try out any of the above services, to prove their worth and usefulness. If your business depends heavily on online traffic, you should be serious about internal analysis, benchmarking and competitor intelligence. Once you are comfortable with a service, you can always migrate to a paid version to get much more information and benefits. By comparing your website with the competitors and the industry in general, you can keep abreast of your online performance.

Remember all the above explained tools try to offer estimated traffic data of a site. So this is not an actual number of visitors to that site. Among all, Google Analytics is the best but applicable for site owners. So if you really need to know the traffic data of a website then request the site owners to share the data from their Google Analytics account.

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Editorial Staff at WebNots are team of experts who love to build websites, find tech hacks and share the learning with community.

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Leave your reply.

Thank you so much for the info. It is a good starting point.

Been using SimilarWeb for while now and it’s awesome. Not very accurate, but still awesome.

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Website Analytics

Let’s Make It Clear: Pageviews, vs. Visits vs. Sessions

The Internet community and the number of websites are vast, only to be outnumbered by the plethora of web analytics-related terms that sound similar but have different meanings. Have you ever felt lost between terms like pageview, visit, and session? We are here to help you out on this one.

In this article, we clarify what pageview, visit, and session means. We will highlight the similarities and differences and then dive into the endless possibilities of session analysis. We will cover everything you need to know about session replay , from its meaning, through its benefits, to its usage. What’s more, we have gathered some tips to take session replay analysis to the next level. Finally, we also look ahead to future opportunities for improvement.

Want to know more? Keep on reading.

Glossary of Web Analytics Terms 

When someone loads your website in their browser, it is called a page view. Let’s imagine a visitor comes across your blog post using a search engine. However, one of their browser addons stops some of the content from displaying properly, necessitating a page reload. In that case, your analytics report will show two page views, even though they were created by the same visitor (and in a short period of time).

A page visit, on the other hand, occurs when someone comes to your site from somewhere other than your website’s domain. For example, a visitor who finds your content online and then reloads the page is still considered one visit. This is often complemented by the word unique, as in unique visits or unique visitors because users are identified by the cookie used on the computer. If a visitor comes to the site five times in a month, for example, this measure will count as one person regardless of the number of visits. In website analytics, users are a critical metric.

This figure depicts the number of visitors who engage with your website over a given period of time. When someone visits your website, a session begins, and it normally ends a few minutes after he or she stops doing so. A Google Analytics session normally terminates after 30 minutes of inactivity.

An action can take many different forms, such as visiting a website, downloading a file, or filling out a form. Another scenario is when a visitor decides to buy a product, adds it to their shopping cart, and then returns to read the product description. Although there were two page views, the number of sessions remained the same because it was the same user.

In summary, a session is the total amount of time a user spends on your website over a period. Typically, your analytics tool will track all activity such as views and engagement with items or forms within a single session. It is an important metric to keep track of because it adds context to your views and visits.

Sessions and their analysis provide a wealth of opportunities for website owners to improve. If you don’t want to be left behind, this is what we are going to talk about below.

Everything You Need to Know About Session Replay as a Web Analytics Tool

Session replay, session recording, customer experience analytics, in-page web analytics, mouse recording tool, user replay, user session replay, user experience replay, visitor session replay, visitor replay,  visitor recordings, visitor playbacks, visitor behavior analytics, visual session recording, visual analytics, website session replay, website video replay are all synonymous with what we are about to discuss. 

Although the names are quite revealing, let us tell you a little more about the topic.

What is Session Replay in Web Analytics?

Session replay, in a nutshell, is a solution or a qualitative web analytics tool which also known as session recording, and that allows digital teams to review footage of real, anonymous consumers interacting with their websites or apps.

This tool actually allows you to track every activity on your website for each of your visitors. It’s like looking over their shoulder, but you can do this without disturbing them with the fact that you are actually watching, so they can behave naturally. 

Session replay allows you to track visitor mouse movements and clicks to identify conversion funnel pain points. It is identical to studying video footage to determine what a single visitor is looking for, what visitors have not found, what frustrations might cause them to turn back, or even quit.

Who Uses Session Replay? 

The tool itself does not require significant expertise, so even novice website owners can use it with confidence. Furthermore, because it provides fully website-specific qualitative data, it can be a powerful web analytics tool for website analysis for large enterprises. 

Significant results can be obtained through session replay if we combine the analysis to basic qualitative metrics (the traffic source, new visitor conversion rate, bounce rate, return visitor conversion rate, interactions per visit, value per visit, cost per conversion, exit pages, etc) and are aware of the logic behind each metric.

In summary, session replay is a great partner in the website optimization process for all e-commerce players, including web analysts, customer support managers, e-commerce specialists, digital marketers, optimizers, product managers, and UX designers.

Advantages of Session Replays

Even though web analysis with session replay is very time-consuming and demands significant focus, it has numerous advantages. Without being exhaustive, we have collected a few that clearly highlight session replays as a tool among simple quantitative metrics. So the session replay:

• Recognize and empathize with your visitors’ feelings and user experience
• Provides a clear picture of the user journey
• Examine how visitors engage and interact with various website features.
• Identify bugs , issues, and obstacles
• Uncover why visitors are leaving your website
• Help team members and clients make decisions by visualizing findings
• Answers what quantitative metrics leave open
• Prevents guesswork through reliable, real user data.

Nevertheless, some people have concerns about private information. This personal initiable information (PII) can be names, phone numbers, emails, or even other account data. However, most session replay vendors use selective or full masking to prevent such data from falling into unauthorized hands.

How to Use Session Replay

Once you have found the most useful web analytics tool on the market to provide you with a complete analysis, you can get down to the real work.

The first thing you should do is segment your visitor group. Determine which visitors are returning and which are new. The reason for this is that returning users are already familiar with your website, so they can navigate it as if nothing were wrong. This may lead to incorrect conclusions, so take your time and do not rush through the process.

Do not try to repair all the flaws at once after you uncover them — you’ll be shocked by how many you may find in a single session. Make a hierarchy list and take notes. Select the issues that have the greatest influence on the overall user experience and address them while running usability tests until you are happy with the results of your conversion rate and user interface. Then move on to the less important concerns and repeat the process.

Tips to Get The Most Out of Your Session Replay Analysis

Owning a powerful analytics tool like session replay does not mean you have a winning case for undiscovered customer journeys, low conversion rates, or high bounce rates. If you know what to look for and how to look for it, you are on the road to an optimized website. That is why we have put together a list of tips that can bring decisive results to your session replay analysis with little investment of time and energy.

1. Focus on what’s important

“Data are just summaries of thousands of stories – tell a few of those stories to help make the data meaningful.” – Chip & Dan Heath, Authors of Made to Stick, Switch.

As a website owner, it is understandable to want to look into every session and solve the problems or frustrations of every visitor, but this usually results in a long, endless, and often fruitless analysis. Instead of watching random sessions, go over the most important ones and their timestamps. But how will you know which sessions are important? – You may ask. Today, most session recording tools, such as Capturly, have add-ons that provide a solution to this very problem. By using artificial intelligence to highlight the most essential sessions and timestamping critical user events, you can focus on the key events and important sessions.

2. Follow the trails

“The goal is to turn data into information, and information into insight.” – Carly Fiorina

Once you have narrowed down the myriad of sessions to review, you can start the actual analysis. You can even begin the examination with some preliminary assumptions as a hypothesis , but after a few sessions, a key user problem may emerge. Further analysis should be built on this particular problem, looking for indications of it. The issue may only occur on a specific operating system, device or browser, so you need to optimize your website based on this information.

3. Complete the analysis with heatmaps

“Visualization gives you answers to questions you didn’t know you had.” – Ben Schneiderman

For a fully optimized website, it is worth combining your session replay tool with other qualitative web analytics such as website heatmaps . So we recommend it choose a tool that gives you both options. Capturly offers three types of website heatmaps for a completely optimized result: click heatmap, scroll heatmap, and segment heatmap. Unlike a session replay, heatmaps show an aggregated view of individual subpages of your website, such as the main page or a product page. Different heatmaps focus on different analytical aspects of your website.

Click heatmap

Click maps visualize the most commonly used elements of your page by showing you which buttons are clicked, analyzing the effectiveness of the structure, finding out what motivates your visitors.

Scroll heatmap

Scroll maps show you how far your visitors scroll down on each page. This is useful because it makes it easier to decide where to put your main call-to-action on different platforms like mobile and desktop. It is also helpful when it comes to deciding on how to optimize the position of the elements.

Segment heatmap

A segment map is a less common type of website heatmap. It allows you to segment your visitors in several ways. You can use it to compare new vs. returning visitors, visitors arriving from certain operating systems (Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, Linux, Android, and Apple’s iOS, etc), and browsers (Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, Opera), and visitors arriving from different devices (desktop, laptop computers, mobile phones, tablets).

4. Do not forget about the big picture, aka conversion funnel optimization

“The big picture doesn’t just come from distance; it also comes from time.” – Simon Sinek

With a thorough understanding of the bugs and issues with the user experience on each site, and the strengths and most popular elements of the user interface revealed, it is time to look at the conversion funnel . After all, this is how visitors, leads, and potential customers will encounter our website. Leaks may occur in the funnel after some pages have been optimized. Session replay and heatmaps are excellent tools to optimize your conversion funnel which decreases bounce rate, boosts your sales, and this way increases your profit. Not worth missing, is it?

The Future of Session Replay

Nowadays, although the world of numbers, i.e. quantitative metrics, dominates web analytics, qualitative solutions such as session replay or website heatmaps are also very popular, as they offer websites an unmissable opportunity to stay ahead of the competition. 

That’s why most session replay tool vendors already provide users with monitoring all digital channels like websites or mobile app on a single platform, reducing the impact on the performance of channels while still getting data, and sharing access with business users throughout the enterprise to reduce reliance on IT and business analysts.

​​However, if it has not already been done, greater importance is attached to creating visual maps of all customer journeys, funnels, and individual sessions, also no need for pre-configuration or tagging to accommodate any application changes in real-time will be typical. Compressing high volumes of data, importing and exporting data at a lightning speed, masking PII, and meeting the highest security standards of the industry will be essential properties. 

However, one thing that will change hugely will change the entire session replay analysis. And it is something that is weaving its way into our everyday lives ever more imperceptibly and rapidly. It is nothing other than artificial intelligence, or AI. Artificial intelligence will bring big changes to the lives of website analysts, as they will no longer need to analyze hundreds of sessions because AI will examine them, discover patterns, link them, analyze them, and make recommendations. 

While thousands of developers are working on this, it is worth experiencing the power of session replay analysis for yourself. 

The Internet community and quantity of websites are enormous, but they are dwarfed by the variety of web analytics-related phrases that seem the same but have diverse meanings. We defined pickoff, visit, and session in this post and explored the unlimited possibilities of session analysis. 

Session Replay is a web analytics solution that lets digital teams examine footage of real, anonymous users interacting with their websites or apps. Because the tool itself does not require a lot of knowledge, even inexperienced website owners can use it with confidence. It’s akin to analyzing video footage to figure out what a single visitor wants.

It is a great partner in the website optimization process for all e-commerce players. Since it has many advantages, including helping team members and clients decide by visualizing findings. 

Heatmaps can aid in the optimization of your website depending on data from your analytics tool. Check to see if you have a compelling case for untapped customer journeys. You can improve your user experience by looking at the most popular elements of your website. Click heatmaps, scroll maps, and segment maps can all help you figure out what makes your visitors tick. But do not lose sight of the bigger picture, often known as conversion funnel optimization. 

Artificial intelligence will drastically alter the life of website analysts. Thousands of developers are working on it, but you should see for yourself how powerful session replay analysis may be.

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Page Views vs Visits: What’s the Difference (Beginner’s Guide)?

Tools like Google Analytics are essential for any website owner. However, if you’re new to tracking analytics, trying to interpret all the metrics on offer can seem overwhelming. For instance, the difference between page views vs visits can be hard to understand, as the terms sound very similar.

It’s important to clear up this confusion and know what you’re tracking, in order to make data-driven decisions. Fortunately, learning the distinctions between these two metrics isn’t hard, and it may change how you perceive your website’s success.

In this article, we’ll explore page views vs visits and discuss whether they can impact your search engine optimization (SEO) . We’ll also show you where to find these numbers in Google Analytics. Let’s go!

Understanding page views vs visits

A page view occurs whenever someone loads your site in their web browser. For instance, let’s say that a visitor finds your blog post through a search engine. However, one of their browser extensions prevents some of the content from displaying correctly, so they have to reload the page. In that instance, your analytics report will register two page views, even though the same visitor generated them (and in a short period of time).

On the other hand, a page visit happens whenever someone reaches your site from an external source, outside of your website’s domain . For instance, if a user finds your article online and then reloads the page, that still counts as one visit. However, if they navigate away from your website, search for a new keyword in Google, and then land on your page again, this will count as two visits.

To make sense of these metrics, it’s also important to take a look at your site’s ‘sessions.’ A session is the total time a user spends on your website within a certain period. During one session, your analytics tool will typically track all activities such as views and engagement with elements or forms.

A session typically expires after 30 minutes of inactivity ( at least as Google Analytics defines “sessions ). It’s a useful metric to track, as it can give more context to your views and visits.

Why understanding page views vs visits matters for your website

The primary reason these two metrics matter is that they can make you aware of potential problems on your site. For instance, contrary to popular belief, high page views don’t always mean you’re reaching a broad audience.

For example, suppose that your page views are high while visits are low. That could indicate possible user experience (UX) issues on your website. Your visitors might find your navigation confusing , or be unable to locate the information they need, causing them to visit the same pages repeatedly.

On the other hand, some pages might experience high views due to the nature of the content. For instance, readers tend to refer to instructional materials multiple times, so your tutorials might show higher views than other kinds of pages.

In some cases, high page views are a desirable metric, especially if you monetize your site with pay-per-view (PPV) ads. However, it’s generally best to strike a balance between page views and visits, in order to ensure that you’re providing the best possible experience on your site.

On the other hand, high page visits are generally positive, as they indicate that your website is popular. However, if your visits are high while the views are low, it could mean that your audience is not staying around long enough to convert. If that’s the case, it’s worth reviewing your CTAs and value proposition, to make sure they’re clear and engaging.

How page views and visits impact SEO

As isolated metrics, page views and visits are unlikely to be direct ranking factors. However, they might still influence your SEO to some degree. Search engines can use these numbers to calculate other significant tanking factors, such as the UX on your site.

For example, Google bots might interpret high page views as a sign that your website is popular. Organic traffic spikes can significantly boost your SEO, especially if referred from high-authority sites. However, the exact formula behind this calculation is unknown, so we can’t be such just how influential these metrics are.

What we do know is that Google favors websites that are engaging and easy to navigate. A high page view to visits ratio generally indicates that users are spending a lot of time on your site, which is a positive ranking factor. However, if your high page views result from poor UX or irrelevant content, that could negatively impact your SEO.

How to measure page views and visits with Google Analytics

Google Analytics gives you a wealth of information about your website. Provided that you’ve inserted your tracking code correctly (or used a Google Analytics plugin ), you can track all activities on your site, including page views and visits.

Note that Google Analytics uses slightly different terminology to describe visits. In general, it treats visits as ‘sessions’, and unique visitors as ‘users’. The latter metric is also broken down into two categories: new and returning visitors. This can all be a little confusing at first, but it helps to remember that ‘sessions’ will always be equal to or higher than ‘users’ (as the same person can visit multiple times).

You can access these details via Audience > Overview :

Google Analytics also enables you to track new and returning visitors in more detail. When you navigate to Behavior > New vs. Returning , you can compare metrics such as the average session duration, bounce rate, and conversions:

Note that you can also track a metric called ‘new users,’ which is not the same as ‘new visitors’. Google explains that it measures new user activity based on cookie usage, however, so these metrics will be very similar.

To learn more, check out our guide to the Google Analytics interface .

The concept of page views vs visits can seem confusing at first. However, once you understand the difference, it can help you identify potential issues on your website. For instance, high page views could indicate that your visitors can’t find the information they need, so it’s worth tracking it in conjunction with other data.

Let’s quickly recap the distinction between these two metrics:

• A page view occurs whenever a browser loads your site. Therefore, one visitor can generate many page views.
• A visit occurs whenever someone arrives at your page from an external source, such as Google search results or another website.

To start tracking all of these metrics, you can add Google Analytics to your site or use another web analytics tool.

Do you have any questions about page views vs visits? Let us know in the comments section below!

By John Hughes

Themeisle contributor.

John is a self-taught WordPress designer and developer. He has been working with the CMS for over a decade, and has experience operating as a freelancer and as part of an agency. He’s dabbled in everything from accessible design to website security. Plus, he has extensive knowledge of online business topics like affiliate marketing.

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Website Performance Metrics: Page Views v. Page Visits

When your website is your 24/7 sales team (if it’s not, it should be) paying attention to the data it brings back to you is the best way to make sure you’re able to help your visitors get their needs met and drive sales . 

Your handy HubSpot Marketing Analytics tool tells you right away how many page views and page visits you’re getting, but what do these metrics actually mean? And how do you use these to make the best data-driven decisions ? Let’s see. 

Page Views vs. Page Visits

Page views are recorded when someone loads or reloads any page on your website either from another page on your website or from an external page. 

Page visits represent visits to any page on your website exclusively from an external site such as Google, social media platforms, or another website. 

In other words, every page visit is a page view, but not the other way around.

However, they both give you equally important data about what your website visitors need and how well your website is doing its job.

You might think that an increase in page views means that your website is performing well, but that’s not always true. 

Website performance requires you to analyze other metrics that are right there on your dashboard, too, like sessions, bounce rate, and CTA clicks. 

Even so, understanding the difference between page views and page visits goes a long way toward helping you understand buyer behavior through page performance so you can adapt and improve accordingly. 

Understanding Page Views of a Website

A page view is when any page on your site is loaded by a web browser like Firefox or Google Chrome. 

When you have HubSpot, a tracking code is loaded to a visitor’s IP address, so even if the same visitor visits your site again before the 30 minute session timer is up, that counts as one view. 

In this way, even if a page is refreshed numerous times by the same person, it still only counts as one page view. 

Unique page views

A unique page view is one that is generated by the same user during the same 30-minute session.

For instance, when you landed on this article to start reading, you created one page view. If you refresh the page, another page view is created, but the unique page views will still only be one because both are coming from you–the same visitor.

This helps us analyze our website data accurately so we know exactly what our visitors need the most (so we can make more of it). 

Understanding Page Visits to a Website

A page visit happens when a visitor reaches your site from somewhere outside of your website domain . 

In other words, it’s when a person on a different site clicks on a link that takes them to your site–or if they type your website URL directly into their browser.

How it works: A new page visit to our site, for instance, triggers HubSpot’s tracker to begin recording that visitor’s activity across the pages linked to our domain. A page visit ends when a visitor leaves our domain by going to an external site or closing their browser window.

A good example of this is the following scenario: someone Googles “website performance analytics.” They find this blog article and click on it. That creates a page visit for our report.

If they read the article but were looking for information about sessions or bounce rate, they go back to their search results. During their search, they come across our article on how to Build Custom Reports in HubSpot or Easy Blog Performance Analytics with HubSpot Reports –in which we cover that metric–and they enter our website again. This would count as another page visit. 

That’s because they left our site and came back from another external referring domain, and HubSpot would record this as a new visit. 

Understanding these two metrics helps you get clarity on which of your pages are working and serving their purpose: 

• to bring in new visitors 
• to help them with what they need, and 
• to convert them into happy customers who promote your brand. 

A Peek Behind the Curtain

For instance, our blog article Best 10 Benefits of HubSpot CMS has more page visits over time which tells us that people value information like this, so we create more articles that help our visitors with HubSpot–thus, we created the article you’re reading right this minute. 

By the way, thanks for reading–because that did a lot for our bounce rate which showed us this content is engaging and helpful. 

What’s “bounce rate,” you ask? Watch our blog for coming articles on website performance metrics, or follow us on LinkedIn where we post our blog a few times a week. 

A big part of our work is helping people with HubSpot onboarding , and our clients and potential clients value having something in hand to help. 

As a HubSpot Platinum Solutions Partner , we’re experts on which HubSpot tools a business needs to grow better (and how to use them), and we love to share what we know. Got HubSpot? If not, ask us how it can help you serve your customers even better. 

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All Help Files > Meaning of Hits, Visits, Page Views and Traffic Sources - Web Analytics Definitions

Meaning of Hits, Visits, Page Views and Traffic Sources - Web Analytics Definitions

There are many programs available that allow you to track visitors on your site, how they got to you and what they did while they were there. The statistics can be a little confusing so here is a little explanation of what you will be looking at and what each item really means.

• Direct Navigation (type URL in traffic, bookmarks, email links w/o tracking codes, etc.)
• Referral Traffic (from links across the web, social media, in trackable email, promotion & branding campaign links)
• Organic Search (queries that sent traffic from any major or minor web search engines)
• PPC (click through from Pay Per click sponsored ads, triggered by targeted keyphrases)

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Counting Visits To Your Website

If you have a website, you may wonder how to count visits on your website to learn how many people are visiting your site. There are a few reasons why you would want to know this, and a couple of ways to learn about your website traffic.

Why Check Your Website Traffic Stats?

Even if you are not actively marketing your website, you might just want to know if people are coming to your website. Perhaps you just launched your website or recently went to a networking event and handed out a bunch of business cards: it would just be interesting to know how many people are coming to your website.

Determining Impact of SEO & Marketing

If you have started or changed some SEO settings on your website, optimized some content for keywords and phrases, or started some marketing campaigns with social media, email or PPC advertising, it is important to track, measure and analyze your website traffic. This data is critical to making adjustments to these efforts in order to maximize your investment and the success of your campaigns. 

Choosing The Right Size Website Hosting Plan 

Some website hosting companies structure their plan levels to limit the number of visits allowed on each plan. A basic, less expensive plan, will include a smaller number of visits allowed compare to a larger, more expensive hosting plan, which allows more traffic. This applies to shared hosting, where the hosting company has large servers divided into sections for each website/client account. If one website uses too many resources, it can jeaopordize the performance of the other websites on that server. In order to select the appropriate plan for your website, you should have an idea of how many visits your website gets per month.

How To Count Visits To Your Website

There are different ways to count visits to a website. In order to count visits, some code needs to be present to collect data that will measure “hits.” As user’s attention has become increasingly focused on privacy, many people utilize blockers or browsers which prevent their internet activity from being measured by Google and some other services. 

Another consideration is what constitutes a “visit.” Most often, measurement data counts “unique IP address” hits. Every computer/device on the web has an identifying address, which is tracked in logs on website servers, and can also be counted by installing tracking codes on a site. This means that if someone “visits” your website and looks at 5 pages, their activity still only counts as one “visit.” Analytics tools can also measure “page views” to provide more detail about the behavior of your website visitors. 

Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA) is the standard for measuring website traffic. GA provides an amazing amount of data and is the best way to count website visits for curiosity and to measure results of marketing efforts.

After installing a tracking code on your website, Google beings tracking unique IP address visits to your website, and also records what activity is performed by each visitor, including how long they stay on your site, which pages they visit, which page they exit from, and more.

Google Analytics uses cookies to track visitors. When someone visits a website that uses Google Analytics, a ‘cookie’ is added to their browser. This cookie is basically a name tag – a unique ID number that Google can use to identify a repeat visit. As a result, Google cannot track ALL visits. Many people clear their cookies daily, weekly, or block cookies entirely, so they won’t be counted.

Google also uses javascript to track visits. This means Google may not track a visit if the whole page (or at least enough of it to get to the analytics script) doesn’t load, if JavaScript is disabled, or if the request is not loading in a browser window. 

Website Hosting “Visits” Statistics

Many WordPress hosting companies offer tiered plans which include different features and which have limits on storage and bandwidth or visits. It is therefore important to understand how large your website is and how much traffic your website gets in order to pick a plan that is sufficient. 

Unfortunately, website traffic counts from GA may not be helpful in making this determination. If you’re comparing Google Analytics data to data provided by your hosting company, data from another Analytics platform, or even data from Google AdWords, you will have discrepancies. The discrepancies are usually a result of javascript blocking and cookie deletion as described above.

We talk about “bots” here, to describe the importance of allowing your website to be crawled by Google bots. However, there are lots of other bots which crawl websites and in many cases which try to hack into your website. When a bot visits your site, it may or may not be counted as a visit. 

Bots make it difficult to accurately measure visits to your website for the purposes of selecting a hosting plan. Hosting companies need to protect their servers and all the websites they host, by ensuring that their servers are not overloaded by a spike in website traffic – whether this is “legitimate” marketing traffic to the front end of the website, or hits to the site from bots.

Bots can fool user agents, in which case they might appear legitimate in hosting access logs, but don’t show up in Google Analytics or other tools that rely on JavaScript running in the visitor’s browser. Because of this, it is normal for there to be a discrepancy between the total visits in GA and a hosting company’s stats. 

Most hosting companies try not count visits from well-known “bot” user-agents and do their best to filter them out of our analytics data. This also includes API calls, search engine crawlers, uptime bots, etc. Brute force “wp-login.php,” can be difficult to identify and block, but many hosts try to block these from their stats as well.

If a hosting company notices an increase in traffic to your website, they may charge you for an overage, or ask you to upgrade to a more expensive, larger plan. This can be a good news/bad news scenario if your traffic is up because your marketing efforts are working! But if you are not doing marketing or SEO, haven’t changed anything that would cause an increase in “real” traffic and if GA shows a small fraction of the visits your host tells you they have measured, your host likely is counting bots.

It can be frustrating to deal with a hosting company that wants to charge you or who asks you to upgrade your plan based on statistics that do not effectively eliminate non-human traffic.

It is important to understand that bot traffic requires server resources (RAM/CPU/bandwidth). Website hosting  servers still have to serve those visitors, whether they are reported as “visits” or not in their measurement used to determine plan overages. Bot traffic is not something that a website owner can limit or control,* which makes it difficult to determine who pays for this traffic in the end. 

*A web application firewall (WAF)  from a provider like Cloudflare or Sucuri have extensive databases of what should be treated as “bad” traffic, and traffic from these “bad” IP addresses is prevented from ever hitting your site when you use these services. 

How Hosting Companies Measure Website Visits

Here is how different hosting companies we use measure visits, and how their stats compare to GA (some of these are affiliate links):

Site Ground

SiteGround measures CPU Time Usage . This is the amount of CPU time in seconds your scripts consume. Site Ground uses AWStats, which should provide a reasonable estimate of visits for the purposes of sizing a hosting plan.

To find this data, log in to cPanel and click on “Awstats” from within the “Metrics” section. Look for the total in the “Number of visits” column.

We have noticed that if a site’s CPU usage spikes and goes over the monthly limit, Site Ground may put up a temporarily suspended page on your live site until you contact them to request they reset their counter or upgrade.

WPEngine takes the number of unique IP addresses seen in a 24-hour period as the number of “visits” to the site during that period (factoring out well-known “bot” user agents, and static requests). The number of “visits” in a given month is the sum of those daily visits during that month.

On their website, WPEngine defines a visit as meeting these criteria:

• When a human being first arrives on the site and loads the page, staying there for 31 seconds, that’s a visit.
• If that same human then clicks a link and sees another page, that’s not a new visit; that’s part of the same visit.
• If that same human doesn’t have cookies or Javascript enabled, still all that should count as one visit.
• If that same human loads the site with a different browsers, that’s still not a new visit; that’s part of the same visit.
• If that same human bookmarks the site, then 11 days later comes back to the site, that is a new visit.
• When a robot loads your site, our servers render it just like they would for a human visitor. However, this visit may not represent a value to you, which is why we will not count bot traffic toward your total visits. 
• There are additional cases too where the “right thing to do” is less clear. For example, take the case of a “quick bounce.” Suppose a human clicks a link to the site, then before the site has a chance to load the human clicks “back.” Does that count as a visit? Our servers still had to render and attempt to return the page, so in that sense “yes.” But a human didn’t see the site and Google Analytics isn’t going to see that hit, so in that sense “no.” Because we need the notion of a “visit” to correspond to “the amount of computing resources required to serve traffic,” we round off in favor of saying “yes.”

WPEngine does not count “image visits” or visits from well-known “bot” User Agents towards traffic charges.

Flywheel determines which plan you require based on the amount of traffic to your site. Specifically, the number of “visits” to your site in a given month. They define a visit as a unique IP address in 24-hour period.

“Like we mentioned, there are a ton of ways to measure traffic. Some hosting companies use pageviews, some use visitors, and some just make things up. Visits is an easy metric for us to measure on the server side, without having to inject any code into your site, which could potentially slow it down…. We use an intelligent algorithm for checking for bots and crawlers instead of relying on potentially outdated bot lists.”

Flywheel used to measure login attempts by bots toward their visitor counts, which has caused a lot of confusion and frustration . On some websites, this caused an enormous discrepancy of over 10x the traffic that showed in GA.

In response to customer frustration, Flywheel has shifted their logic around how they measure site visits to reduce the number of reported visits for each site. Instead of using known bot lists (which are hard to keep updated/change all the time) and counting everything else as a visit, they’ve more clearly defined what they “know” is a visit and are instead counting everything else as a bot. (This aligns very closely with the way WP Engine counts visits, and WPEngine recently acquired Flywheel .)

As a higher-end hosting provider, Liquid Web prides itself on excellent service and performance. They also do not have a limit on website traffic:

• No overage fees, traffic limits, or metered pageviews.

GoDaddy Managed WordPress hosting offers 4 plan levels with “visitor” limits starting at 25K/month. GoDaddy measures visits 

Kinsta ’s hosting plans are based on the total number of monthly visits to your site on the server. The number of visits in a given month is the sum of the unique IP addresses seen each 24-hour period as recorded in the Nginx logs. They recently moved from a bandwidth-based pricing model over to a visit-based pricing model due to the fact that this is easier for many users to understand and calculate, and then settle on the appropriate hosting plan.

Here are few examples of what exactly triggers and doesn’t trigger a visit at Kinsta:

• When a human arrives to your site and loads the page, this is a visit.
• When a human arrives to your site, and then browses to a new page, this is a still considered one visit.
• When a human arrives to your site from two different browsers, this is treated as one visit due to the fact that it is the same IP address.
• When a human arrives to your site at home and then later from work they will have used two different IP addresses to access the site and will be counted as two different visitors. This also means that every visit in a day from a given location will be only counted once no matter how many devices were used to load your site from that location as long as the visitor in question uses the same internet connection.

Pagely is the first and largest managed WordPress hosting platform. All plans include unlimited page views. Josh Strebel, founder of Pagely says “We don’t count/measure/bill on visits or pageviews. We never have.” Pagely offers VPS hosting and is designed for larger, enterprise level sites and agencies.

Other Ways To Measure Visits

You can install a statistics package on your server on your own to check website visitors. This would allow a more accurate accounting of website visitors.

AWStats is a program that is included by many web hosts who use cPanel, however, you can also install it yourself. The visitor stats this package provides should provide a reasonable estimate of visits for the purposes of sizing a hosting plan.

You can also install CloudFlare. CloudFlare can filter out any kind of “spammy” requests based on origin IP, User Agent, etc (CloudFlare maintains an extensive database of what should and should not be trusted). This is done at the DNS level so that those requests never make it to the server. Taking this step may show a number closer to the host’s visit stats  vs. what Google Analytics reports.

Choosing the right hosting provider and plan for your website is important. You need to choose a reliable hosting company that will give you good service, and whose plan 

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What is a page visit?

A page visit (or visit) occurs when a reader clicks on your website from an external source. This could be from social media, another website, or from typing in your URL directly into their web browser. Once someone lands on your site from somewhere outside of your website domain, it officially counts as a page visit.

In theory, page visits can give you an idea of how many people are actually coming to your website. However, not all page visits are created equal. For example, let’s say someone clicks on your website from Twitter, reads one blog post, and then immediately leaves. This would count as one page visit. However, a website visitor who clicks on your website from Google, reads three articles, and then signs up for your newsletter would also count as one page visit.

Bottom line: While page visits can give you some sense of website traffic, they’re not going to give you the full picture.

Pageviews vs page visits

So, what’s the difference between pageviews and page visits? Differentiating between these two metrics is key for understanding audience behavior and how your audience is interacting with your content.

A pageview is defined as a request for a link on your website. If someone visits your website and looks at three different articles, that would count as three pageviews.

Technically, it’s true that every page visit is a pageview. But not the other way around.

Pageviews can also be a misleading  metric , because of bots, refresh rates, cookies, and multiple pageviews per visit. For example, if a visitor encounters an issue with an extension on your page and refreshes the browser, creating a page request, it now counts as a second pageview, inflating your pageview numbers.

Sessions, visits, and users in Google Analytics

Google Analytics , one of the original website analytics tools, has been around since 2005 and is still widely used today. With the  introduction of Google Analytics 4 , the search engine platform switched from a session-based data model to an event-based one. So visits and visitors are now “sessions” and “users”.

This change was designed to more accurately reflect how users  interact  with web content. A session is a visitor metric that groups together analytics activities taken by a single visitor (user) on your website. Sessions are time sensitive and end after 30 minutes of inactivity.

Sessions track user engagement with elements like:

• Ecommerce transactions

Why doesn’t Parse.ly track visits?

Now that we’ve established clarity around visits, let’s look at how Parse.ly thinks about them. We don’t track visits, except in a few specific cases. Much more of Parse.ly’s focus is on unique devices/users/browsers with the concept of ‘visitors.’

Here’s why:

Focus on real-time analytics

As a real-time analytics provider, visits rely too much on an extended session (typically, 30 minutes for a visit-within-the-day and 30 days for a returning-visit-within-the-month). Whereas, a “visitor is a visitor” whether it arrived at your site in the last 5 minutes or millions arrived at your site across any given time range. Visitors, a metric Parse.ly does track, generalizes better across real-time and historical time windows.

Multi-channel approach

Visits can only be measured reliably in the Website channel, and most Parse.ly customers these days do  multi-channel measurements  across at least 2 of our supported channels (Website, AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, Apple News, iOS, Android). Parse.ly prefers to use core metrics that can be measured across all channels and thus can be rolled up (even if with some caveats/limitations) across channels.

We also found that visits are simply confusing to our users (they can be measured quite differently depending on methodology), whereas “visitors” map better to a well-understood real-world concept like a browser, device, cookie ID, device ID, or person/user.

Engagement tracking

Visitors work better as a “context metric” with  engaged time  than visits do. We use visitors divided by total engaged time to calculate the average engaged time (per visitor) to given posts/pages, and this enables average engaged time.

Get better user insights with Parse.ly

At Parse.ly, we focus on offering 21st-century solutions to content creators with engagements as our primary metric. Successful digital marketing and content teams have shifted to a multi-channel approach to increase ROI and our real-time analytics platform is designed to use  core metrics  that can be measured across all channels.

Visits are an outdated and limiting metric because they can only be measured reliably in the Website channel. We’ve built an easy-to-use platform that collects better insights so that you can get better results.

If you’re looking for more meaningful ways to track your audience engagement,  talk to us today .

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What is a Website Traffic Estimator?

Importance of web traffic analysis and monitoring, how to use the tool.

• Check Your Own Website
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• Final Thoughts on Website Traffic Checker Tool

It is an essential tool for any site owner or marketer looking to optimize their online presence. Our website traffic checker is a versatile and powerful data analysis tool designed to help you track, analyze, and optimize your website’s performance.

Key features of the domain traffic checker:

• All-in-One Dashboard: Access comprehensive data from Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and SERP in one convenient place, saving time and effort.
• Easy-to-Use Interface: With user-friendly dashboards, our web traffic lookup makes it easier than ever to navigate between your website’s metrics smoothly and uncover opportunities for growth.
• Competitor Analysis: Stay ahead of the competition by analyzing organic traffic data , SERP visibility, and top traffic-generating keywords of your competitors. Leverage these insights to optimize your site and outrank your rivals.
• Global SEO platform features: Our global SEO platform offers much more than just traffic data analysis. Sitechecker includes a variety of functionalities such as SEO audits ( on-page & off-page), rank tracking , site monitoring, and more. With Such useful data analysis, you can easily eliminate threats and foresee opportunities.

Analyzing your website’s traffic data is crucial to promoting online presence and increasing organic search visitors and sales. Regardless of the size of your site or the number of users, regular user session audits are essential.

Our tool provides valuable information about your website visitors, including their sources (organic, direct , paid , social , referral , email etc.) and behavior, and also offers insights to optimize your site by identifying areas that need improvement. The more detailed data you process, the better and more accurate results you will get.

If you’re not monitoring your site’s performance and ranking, then you’re missing out on potential visitors and new users constantly. Every day, there are new engagement metrics to measure a site’s success, but the basics of website traffic checks remain vital.

We’ve created a video guide to help you delve deeper into traffic estimation and fully utilize all the features that our traffic finder provides.

Step 1: Input the domain for which you want to check traffic, then click the “Check traffic” button

Step 2: Specify the site for which you would like to access traffic data

Our powerful tool provides you with easy access to traffic data for both your own website and your competitors. We have also included a range of valuable features to help you gain more profound insights into both scenarios. Using those features provides you with a better understanding of your online performance and a competitive edge in your industry. By answering whether it is your website or not, you help us prepare the right dashboard for your needs.

Step 3: Access your results and take advantage of our powerful features

For your own site.

To access data for your own site, simply select ‘Yes, it is mine’ and connect your GA and GSC accounts. This fantastic feature can really come in handy for site admins, SEOs, and marketers. It allows you to monitor the website traffic from the two best analytics platforms, all in one place. We have also created custom dashboards with valuable insights.

Take a look at our general traffic dashboards that provide insights on all visitors and organic traffic from Google Analytics. The data represented in visibility is based on your top ranking keywords, while others, like impressions, clicks, click-through rates (CTR), positions, and ranking keywords are based on Google Search Console’s top metrics.

To track your website’s dynamics smoothly, our dashboards also have many other in-depth insights with a user-friendly interface. For example, if you have e-commerce data in Google Analytics, you can access sales data and correlations with traffic. This gives you a complete picture of your website’s revenue performance. Moreover, it’s easy to check data for a specific time range, whether daily, weekly, or monthly.

If you’re interested in GSC insights, check out the board that includes performance, positions, visibility, top 100 keywords, and top 100 landing pages.

A similar board is for the keywords from the rank tracker.

If you own multiple websites, work for an SEO agency, or manage a large entrepreneurial website, our tool has a specific feature you’ll appreciate. The project dashboard allows you to track traffic and other performance metrics for a bulk of sites that you or your clients own. Alternatively, you can separate a large project into specific parts or languages, for example, and track them individually.

If you need to make reports for your clients, we’ve got you covered. We’ve already created them for you, so all you need to do is download or share them.

For competitor websites’ analyze

Firstly, we recommend selecting a specific region to ensure that the data is clear, up-to-date, and provides insight into the local market situation for analysis.

Let’s take a closer look at the main elements of a website traffic estimator and consider how they help you evaluate your competitors.

Organic traffic: It is generated from the click-through rate (CTR) and search volume associated with each keyword for which the domain ranks.

Traffic Value: Represents the expense associated with driving the estimated monthly organic traffic volume through pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on Google Search. This provides an understanding of the potential financial value of the traffic.

Organic Search Engine Results Page (SERP) positions: This metric displays the number of keywords for which a competitor ranks within various SERP positions: top 1, 2-3, 4-10, 11-20, 21-30, 31-50, 51-70, and 71-100. It offers insight into the overall visibility of the competitor in search results.

Furthermore, our competitor’s traffic estimation includes an additional feature, Top Keywords. This feature allows you to examine the top 30+ keywords for which the site ranks. Each keyword is accompanied by its relevant URL in the SERP, position in the search results, average monthly search volume, cost per click (CPC) from Google Ads, and the top geographical locations where the website ranks for the keyword.

If you are interested in not only calculating competitor site visitors but also assessing their technical SEO performance, you can take advantage of our SEO audit feature.

Unlock the Power of Your Website's Performance with Our Traffic Checker Tool!

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Final Thoughts on Website Visitor Checker

Our tool is a universal solution for various visitor analysis needs. You can use it to aggregate data from GA, GSC, and SERP in one place. With fully automatic set-up dashboards, you can get useful insights and focus on the data that will give you the best results. Additionally, you can use it for market analysis and competitor checks, including organic traffic estimation and price evaluation. Find out which keywords give your rivals the best visibility and traffic results to improve your own performance. It can be a great solution for controlling and analyzing traffic in one place.

Can I check website traffic for free?

How to check website traffic for my website, how to find traffic for a competitor's website, can i see the website traffic history using the tool, what is website traffic analysis, can i track website traffic, what users are saying.

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Reflecting over 10 years of investment, Similarweb’s DigitalRank(TM) is the definitive measure of the digital world -- and is relied on daily by leaders like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft. Check out the world’s leading digital brands, and how they stack up:

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Expedia’s traffic decreased by more than 80% year-over-year during April 2020, the apex of the pandemic.

In the two weeks leading up to Prime Day, daily traffic was 11% higher year-over-year across Big Box retailers such as Walmart and Target.

On Black Friday, product views and purchases on Amazon increased by 8% and 18% YoY, respectively.

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The New York Post is the top news & media site in the Northeast region of the U.S., with over 1.4B visits in 2020.

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What is a website session: understand your user behavior by following the right metrics!

Marie Jehanne

November 1, 2023 | 4 min read

Last Updated: Nov 14, 2023

Table of Contents

What is a website session: users, pageviews and differences

About website sessions, does scrolling count in google analytics sessions.

Website sessions are a pivotal part of digital marketing analytics. They encompass the interactions a user has on a website within a specified time frame. Every web page view, social interaction, and transaction is grouped into these sessions .

The standard duration for a session is typically 30 minutes, but this can be adjusted to better reflect the visitor behaviour on the website. The initiation of a session occurs when a user starts browsing a site and ends when the user exits the site or after a period of inactivity, typically 30 minutes. The data derived from these sessions provides valuable insights into user engagement and the overall performance of the website in the digital space.

This information can be utilized to identify trends, evaluate the effectiveness of digital marketing campaigns, and make data-driven decisions about web page design and content. Key metrics derived from the session data include the number of sessions per user, the number of web page views per session, and the average session duration.

Each of these metrics provides a unique perspective on user engagement and website performance. Collectively, they create a comprehensive picture of how users interact with a website, providing valuable insights for enhancing online traffic.

Users, pageviews, and sessions are three fundamental metrics in digital marketing analytics. Users are individuals who have had at least one session within the selected date range. They can be segmented by new or returning users.

Pageviews represent the total number of web pages viewed. Repeated views of a single web page are counted. While users and sessions may seem similar, they represent different aspects of internet browsing engagement.

A single user can have multiple sessions. For example, if a user visits a website in the morning, leaves, and then returns in the afternoon, that would count as two sessions from one user. This distinction is crucial as it allows for a more nuanced understanding of visitor behaviour. Pageviews, on the other hand, represent the total number of individual web pages that were viewed during a session. If a user visits a website and views four different pages, that would count as four pageviews. This metric is useful for understanding which web pages are most engaging or popular among users, thus helping in driving online traffic.

Reconstruct individual visitor sessions to reveal hidden behaviors .

What are users, sessions and pageviews?

Users, sessions, and pageviews are key metrics in understanding website traffic and user engagement. Users are defined as individuals who visit a website. Each user is typically assigned a unique identifier, allowing for tracking of both new and returning visitors.

This metric provides an overall measure of a website’s audience size. Sessions represent the set of interactions a user takes within a given time frame on a website.

This includes web page views, social interactions, transactions, and more. The standard session duration is 30 minutes, but this can be adjusted based on the specifics of a website. This metric provides insights into user engagement and activity on a website. Pageviews are the total number of web pages viewed by users. This includes repeated views of a single page. Pageviews are a measure of website activity and can be used to identify the most popular or engaging pages. By analyzing these three metrics in conjunction, website owners can gain a comprehensive understanding of their website’s performance and user behaviour, thereby enhancing their digital marketing strategies.

What is a website session: differences between sessions, users and pageviews

In the realm of digital marketing, understanding the differences between Sessions, Users, and Pageviews is crucial for effective website management and user engagement. Sessions in the context of website analytics represent the total number of visits to your website. Each session encapsulates all the interactions a user may have while browsing your site within a given time frame.

These interactions can range from viewing different web pages, downloading resources, clicking on links, and other browsing activities. Users, on the other hand, are identified as unique individuals who have initiated at least one session on your website.

These can be either new or returning visitors. The differentiation between users is made through a unique, randomly generated client ID assigned when a person visits your website for the first time. This ID, stored in a cookie on the visitor’s device, allows Google Analytics to recognize returning users, thus providing valuable insights into visitor behaviour.

Pageviews are the total number of web pages viewed on your website. This metric counts every single page reload and revisits, meaning repeated views of a single page are counted as well. Pageviews represent the total number of times the content of your website has been accessed, providing a measure of online traffic. It’s common to see a higher number of pageviews than sessions or users, as a single user can view multiple pages in one session.

Website sessions are a key metric in digital marketing and internet analytics.

A frequently asked question is how Google Analytics defines a session. A session is a group of user interactions with your website that take place within a given time frame. A single session can consist of multiple pageviews, event triggers, or transactions, providing a comprehensive picture of user engagement. Another common question is about the duration of a session. By default, a session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity by the user.

However, this duration can be customized in the tracking code settings, allowing for more flexibility in analyzing visitor behaviour. Additionally, a session can end at midnight or if a user arrives via one campaign, leaves, and then comes back via a different campaign.

Many also wonder about the difference between a session and a user. A session represents all the actions a user takes within a certain duration on your website. A user, on the other hand, is an individual who has initiated at least one session on your website. A single user can have multiple sessions, providing valuable insights into the patterns of online traffic.

Scrolling, on its own, does not contribute to a session in Google Analytics.

A session in Google Analytics is defined by user interactions with a website. These interactions can include pageviews, events, social interactions, and transactions. Scrolling on a webpage does not inherently trigger any of these interactions, and therefore does not count towards a session. However, website owners can set up scroll tracking as an event in Google Analytics.

This allows them to measure how far users scroll down on their webpages, providing a deeper understanding of visitor behaviour. Once set up, each time a user scrolls to a certain point on a webpage, it triggers an event that is recorded in Google Analytics.

These scroll events then count towards the total number of interactions in a session. In conclusion, while scrolling does not automatically count as a session, it can be tracked and counted as an interaction if set up as an event. This can provide valuable insights into user engagement and help enhance the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies.

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Passionate about digital for several years, I am the Inbound Content Manager SEO at Contentsquare. My goal? To teach you how to improve the digital CX of your website and activate the right acquisition levers to generate more traffic on your site and therefore…more sales!

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Mega Millions winning numbers for April 19 drawing: Jackpot climbs to $178 million

The  Mega Millions jackpot for Friday's drawing has climbed to $178 million after no one won the top prize on Tuesday.

The winning numbers were scheduled to be drawn around 11 p.m. ET on Friday, and we will have the results below as soon as they're available.

If a lucky player wins the Mega Millions jackpot on Friday, they can choose to walk away with an estimated $80.4 million in an after-tax lump sum.

Start the day smarter. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.

A few weeks ago, a player in New Jersey won the first Mega Millions jackpot of the year : a whopping $1.13 billion.

Check below for the winning numbers for Friday's, April 19:

Shhhh! If you win the Mega Millions jackpot, be quiet. Then, do this.

In search of Mega Millions numbers? Recent lottery results may offer clues to this jackpot

Mega Millions winning numbers for 4/19/24 drawing

The winning numbers for the Mega Millions drawing for Friday, April 19, were: 46, 34, 30, 19, 58. Megaball: 3

Megaplier: 3X

Winning lottery numbers are sponsored by  Jackpocket, the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network .

Did anyone win Mega Millions? 

Mega Millions players the jackpot is rising again! With no jackpot winners in Friday's drawing Tuesday's jackpot is worth an estimated $202 million. There was one lucky player in Florida who won $1 million after having all the correct white ball numbers for the Match 5.

To view the list of past winners, visit the Mega Millions website . 

What is the Megaplier?

Most states offer the Megaplier feature, which increases non-jackpot prizes by two, three, four and five times.

It costs an additional $1 per play. Before each regular Mega Millions drawing, the Megaplier is drawn. From a pool of 15 balls, five are marked with "2X," three with "4X" and one with "5X."

How to play the Mega Millions

In order to purchase a ticket, you'll have to visit your local convenience store, gas station or grocery store − and in a handful of states,  you can purchase tickets online . 

To play, you will need to pick six numbers. Five numbers will be white balls ranging from 1 to 70. The gold Mega Ball is one number between 1 and 25. 

If you believe the odds are against you, ask for a  "Quick Pick"  or an  "Easy Pick,"  the computer will randomly generate the numbers for you. 

Players can add the  "Megaplier"  for $1, which can increase non-grand prize winnings by two, three, four or five times. The Megaplier is drawn before the Mega Millions numbers on Tuesday and Friday. 

There are 15 Megapiler balls in all:

• 2X , five balls
• 3X , six balls
• 4X , three balls
• 5X , one ball

Where can you buy lottery tickets?

Tickets can be purchased in person at gas stations, convenience stores and grocery stores. Some airport terminals may also sell lottery tickets.

You can also order tickets online through  Jackpocket, the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network , in these U.S. states and territories: Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Puerto Rico, Texas, Washington, D.C., and West Virginia. The Jackpocket app allows you to pick your lottery game and numbers, place your order, see your ticket and collect your winnings all using your phone or home computer.

Jackpocket is the official digital lottery courier of the USA TODAY Network. Gannett may earn revenue for audience referrals to Jackpocket services. Must be 18+, 21+ in AZ and 19+ in NE. Not affiliated with any State Lottery. Gambling Problem? Call 1-877-8-HOPE-NY or text HOPENY (467369) (NY); 1-800-327-5050 (MA); 1-877-MYLIMIT (OR); 1-800-981-0023 (PR); 1-800-GAMBLER (all others). Visit  jackpocket.com/tos  for full terms .

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mega Millions winning numbers for April 19 drawing: Jackpot climbs to $178 million