A visitor count will increase by one only when a user enters the site and not as the user browses through the site pages. This idea is important because a user can visit a site many times in a short time period, thus inflating counts for the previous three measures. An additional standard marketing measure, frequency , can be derived by dividing visits by users. Given their data driven orientation and the current log software available, many Web sites continue to use hits as a way to describe audience measurement. The following sections of this paper describe various reasons that hits do not equal users.
Most web servers maintain a log file of activity on the server.
The log file records physical file access. Each time a client makes a request which requires a file to be read, a new entry is made in the log file. This is an important reason why the number of web hits is deceiving. Consider a very simple web home page which has four graphic elements and a block of text. Even if the user quickly leaves the site, five entries have been recorded in the log file.