More visitors than page views

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Gina Price
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Hello,

I was looking at a year of data and I noticed that some months had more visitors than page views. Do you know how this would happen? Do you have to click out of the page for a page view to count?

I read another post where one reason for 0 page views is accessing the file without going to the site. Would you mind sharing how that works?

I just don't know how to explain why we are reporting more visitors than page views.

Thank you for your help,

Gina
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Michael
Visitor just needs to visit a page (so the page file is requested from the server) for page view to occur.

However, there may be visitors that access site files without visiting site pages. E.g. there may be direct links to download files, documents or images on the site, so they could be downloaded or viewed without visiting site pages. There may be also some spiders or other automated software that accesses files on sites without visiting pages, while not being recognized as spiders by the program (the program contains a database of the most popular spiders and excludes them from visitor calculation by default).

If you wish to get information on visitors who accessed pages only we recommend you to create an include "File" filter with value %PageFiles%
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Gina Price
Michael,

Thanks so much for your help. I think I understand the page view count rules.

So, when I ask the program to analyze logs for a particular website on a directory, should I have an additional filter in the filter tab for %PageFiles%?

For example:
I have filters for a website in the Profile Properties dialog box under the Filter tab.

Exclude - file: /monitor/
Exclude - Spider: *
Include - File: */myWebsite/*

Do I just add Include - File: %PageFiles% to the above list? And this will change the monthly page views in the summary section right?

Will this change the meaning of the other fields or leave out certain information for the rest of the report? Does this affect anything else in the report?

And in the most popular page area, should I assume Hits is page views? I think I read that from an earlier post. Is there any way to edit the heading "hits" to "page views" in the reports if indeed hits is the same as page views in this area? I went to Options, but I couldn't find a way yet to edit that.

Thanks again,

Gina
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Michael
Adding the include filter won't work. Multiple include filters work using "OR" logic - all data that matches at least one of this filters (and don't match exclude filters) is included.

What you need is to create an include filter and choose the "Multiple (Hits)" filter criteria mode instead of the "Single" one. After it you need to choose two criteria here: file criteria with value */myWebsite/* anf another file criteria with value %PageFiles%

Using such filters will affect many reports, as in this case the program will analyze requests for pages only. E.g. it will affect activity reports on hits and bandwidth.

The hits in the most popular pages table are indeed page views. It is possible to hide the Hits column and show the Page Views one (that would show the same statistics anyway) in this report if you use the Professional or Enterprise edition by editing the table in Options > Report > Tables. Please note that if you edit a predefined table, you should enable the "Block table updates" option in it, otherwise the modified table will be overwritten if you reinstall the program.
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Carly Britton
This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled visits higher than page views.

Does anyone know why a report would show double the amount of visits to page views?

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