There are differing opinions on what to track with web metrics and some of it is dependent on what is important to you. This post is by no means the final authority, but rather some things I’ve picked up along the way and want to pass on to others.
Visitors count how many users came to your site, which I feel is a good basic statistic.
Views are useful for understanding visitor loyalty because it can show the frequency and time a visitor spends on your site. You can see how many pages someone looks at before they leave your site.
Hits are requests made to a web server. This is an inaccurate measure because each page can have a number of files. So, to make this a simple example, let’s say you are looking at a page with 20 files. This would be considered one view to the page and 20 hits.
Clicks help you understand how much your visitor is interacting with your site by counting how many times they click on a link or image.
There’s a lot more to web metrics than what is listed above. This post is simply an introduction for people getting started. It’s important to understand the terminology when presenting your data.