Hits vs visitors for Most Downloaded Files

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Lawrence Ladomery
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Looking at the Most Downloaded Files report, what would be the most precise metric to determine the number of complete downloads by individual people?

Would it be... Hits minus Incomplete Requests?

Or Visitors?

Or maybe Visitors minus Incomplete Requests?

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,
visitors hits downloads
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Michael
Unfortunately it's not possible to determine number of complete downloads by analyzing log files. E.g. there are download managers that download files using multiple threads and so may produce large number of incomplete requests without "complete" requests while still downloading complete files.

In most case we recommend to use the number of visitors to estimate number of downloads, while it will also count incomplete downloads.
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Lawrence Ladomery
Hi Michael and thanks for the prompt reply.

For one file I am getting:

Hits: 23,163
Incomplete Requests: 17,684
Visitors: 4,560

Do you think that the big difference between hits and visitors is due to some script or bot?

Also, does Hits include Incomplete Requests or does is it, in this case, a measure of all completed downloads?
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Michael
Hits include Incomplete Requests so the number of "usual" hits in this case is 5,479 that looks realistic.