What exactly is a visit, and how does it compare with hit, page view and session?
In January 2008 we wrote a news/blog posting about a change of policy. In our old policy, we increased the count of visitors every time a thumbnail map was ‘served up’ from our server to someone reading one of your pages. This meant that a ‘visit’ used to correspond formally to a single ‘page view’. Now, if someone visiting from a specific IP address reloads your page 20 times in one day, they will be counted as just 1 visit. This is more representative of the overall flow of visitors to your site, even though it means you can’t use ClustrMaps specifically as a ‘page view counter’ for the purposes of (say) counting advertising page views. For completeness, we note that a ‘hit’ formally refers to every object that is delivered on your page (e.g. a page with 20 images could result in 21 hits, one for the page and one for each of the images). Some counter services consider a ‘session’ to be anything that happens within a 30-minute interval (i.e. 5 page views over a 20 minute period would
