What do the numbers mean?

A visitor is a unique person who visited your site. This visit can indeed spam multiple pages.

A page view is the amount of times a page is viewed.

Note that not all possible places on your site are listed in the page visits table, e.g. category pages, archive pages and such are not listed there.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

@lapzor I think I wanted to ask the same question until I saw this one. I see in most of the posts, the pageviews are more than the number of visitors. Like say, 16 visitors, but pageviews are like 18. Does this mean some visitors reload the page?

It means some visitors visited the same page multiple times in the period you selected. Either by reloading the page, or by returning to the page later on.

We will be adding explanation “on mouse over” on all the statistic headings in the coming update.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

@lapzor interesting. I have had the plugin for a week, but I would swear I see the issue occurring on every post except those with maybe less than 5 views. Either my visitors are doing this or there is a problem with the tracking?

Why do you think there is a problem? The page views will always be higher as visitors as a visitor is counted once while each view of the page by that visitor is counted.

In some other / older tracking systems those visitors were called “unique visitors” and the page views were called “hits”.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

interesting!
unique visitors:
a. if a visitor visits the site, leaves the site and comes back after 10 minutes, will this be counted as 2 visitors?
b. if a visitor visits the site, leaves the tab with the site open, moves to another site through another browser tab, will this be counted as 1 visitor?
c. if a visitor visits the site with browser A., opens another browser B to visit the same site, will this be counted as 2 visitors?

edit b.
b. if a visitor visits the site, leaves the tab with the site open, moves to another site through another browser tab, and returns to the site he started with, will this be counted as 1 visitor?

a. If the cookie is set it’s still 1 visitor
b. yes, still 1 visitor. if the visitor RELOADS the page upon return it’s 2 views (but still only 1 visitor)
c. yes that will be a second unique visitor as they use another browser we can’t be sure if that’s the same person

ad a.
i have set the plugin to NOT use cookies; does that make a difference?

Yes, the difference is that if someone creates a new browser session with the cookie, we still see that as 1 visitor, but without the cookie, a new browser session is a new visitor as we have no way to know for sure if it’s the same person.

thank you!!

@lapzor what if the visitor clicks on an internal link (I have set mine to open on the same tab) and then presses the back button, will that be counted as a pageview? I set my external links to open in a new tab though. Second, does the plugin record pageviews or unique pageviews?

Any time you (re)load a page that is a page view no matter how you end up there (back button, new tab, same tab).

I’m not sure what you mean with “unique page view”, each time a page is viewed it’s counted (again). A visitor is counted once per session, pages are counted each load.

Hope that helps. If you have any questions, please let me know!

See this article How is a Unique Pageview Different? Though I see in settings the plugin does detect unique pageviews with cookies enabled. Just not sure why the discrepancy in number of visitors and pageviews if unique pageviews are counted…