Hi everyone, I just asked the following question on the SBI! forum, and I was wondering if anyone here could share their thoughts and/or give some insight.

I checked my traffic stats for today, and so far I've had 3 unique visitors and a total of 2 visits. But how can the # of visits be lower than the # of unique visitors? Since a unique visitor is like an IP address, doesn't that mean that each unique visitor should have to account for at least 1 visit?

Someone else asked this question a few months ago, and it turns out that a few SBIers are having this issue. Someone suggested that some of the visits may be spiders crawling the site. Someone else actually called support for an answer and was told that if someone clicks on your site and they get a message like "error 404" or "page cannot be displayed", that these count as visits. Also, direct hits to images count as a visit.

so, if this is the case, isn't this completely misleading? Is it something to be worried about? If someone tried to access your site about 20 times yesterday, but they keep getting an error message, SBI would count that as 20 visits. But for me, that's really only 1: the visitor was interested enough in your site to type in the URL or click on a link to it, but the other 19 attempted visits don't mean anything.

Can someone please give insight?

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SBI and a lot of other hosts that offer free stats gather their statistics from the logs of your site. And any time an image is downloaded to a person's computer when they visit is also recorded as a "hit" if I remember correctly. So if you've got a ton of images on your site that will impact the stats. I always get confused by those stats and have never really understood how they are calculated. I do know they are a bit misleading.

So yes, indeed a 404 would register as a visit. But if you are concerned about that you can always run a link check on your site to make sure there are no broken links so rest assured the hits won't be because of a 404.

Have you installed Google Analytics on your site? It's a much more accurate measuring stick for your visits and you can see a true overview of how much traffic you're getting. I never rely on those free stat log trackers.

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