Marketwave Hit List Methods
For more information, please visit the
Marketwave web site.Requests
A request occurs when a web server is asked to provide a page, graphic or other object. This is frequently called a Hit. Requests may be generated either by visitor going to a page or by the page itself requesting an object (usually a graphic). Using the number of requests to gauge the popularity of a site can be misleading because pages with lots of embedded graphics can generate many more requests than sites with simpler graphics. For that reason, the number of visits or the number of HTML page requests will probably give a more accurate activity picture.
Visits
A visit is a collection of requests that represent all the pages and graphics seen by a particular visitor at one time. For example, a visitor to your site may go to 10 HTML pages and indirectly request 25 graphic elements. Those 35 requests represent one visit. The total number of visits is usually more than the total number of visitors because each visitor can visit the site more than once. Visits are just estimates because there is no way to be certain that a series of requests actually belongs to the same person, or, for that matter, to the same person during the same visit. Hit List determines visits based on several factors including IP addresses, cookies and the delay between consecutive requests.
Visitor
A visitor is usually defined simply as a unique IP address. A particular IP address may represent a unique person but, more often, one IP is shared by many people. If your site uses persistent cookies to better identify people, Hit List can also produce reports that calculate visitors based on a combination of unique IP addresses and cookies.
Cookies (to determine visitors)
A cookie is simply an extra bit of information that a web server asks a web browser to transmit with every request. It is most frequently used to assign each site visitor a unique ID code so the web server can recognize when that same person (actually machine) comes back to the site. Such cookies are called Persistent Cookies because they persist even after the visit has ended since they are stored on the visitor's hard disk drive. Sites may also use Session Cookies that exist only during one visit. Cookies are very flexible so the content of the cookie (the Cookie Value) is entirely determined by the web server.