Page views, clicks, hits, they’re all the same…right?

One misconception that I’ve seen when talking about analytics is how people misuse terms when trying to define an action. This comes from adopting a tool’s definition for a behavioral action which has been used for an extended period of time. When you get used to that term, you might think that everything is the same. Imagine if you look at an orange. You might think that all oranges are the same. Not exactly. Even among the same fruit family, there are unique factors that differentiate one kind from the next. The same can be said when looking at tracking tools. In my last blog entry, I mentioned that each tracking solution tracks in accordance to it’s own architecture and metric definition.With so many terms floating around, it’s understandable that you might confuse one term from the other. A clear example that I’ve seen clients, and even internally do is confusing page views with clicks. Note that in general page views is when you land on a page, while click is the action of clicking on a link, which in turn generates a page view.

Another misconceptions is thinking that visits are unique visitors. Note that unique visitors are reported in different flavors (depending on the analytics tool that you’re using):

So next time you seeing data from different tools that are worded differently, rather than generalizing, take the time and look at their definitions and do a little bit of testing. You’ll be quite surprise that just because it looks like an orange and taste like an orange doesn’t have to be an orange.