What is the difference between visitors, visits, and page views?

What is the difference between visitors, visits, and page views?

Visitor

A visitor is someone who visits your site. A visitor is tracked by the cookie placed in their browser by the HubSpot tracking code installed on your site. A single visitor can have multiple visits to your site.

Visit

A visit is anytime a visitor reaches your site from a referring source outside of your website domain. That means the person was on a different site and clicked on a link that took them to your site.

• Scenario 1: A visitor goes to google.com and does a search for "inbound marketing advice". Then, they click on a search result and view www.hubspot.com. This is counted as 1 visit.
  • The visitor had 1 visit to www.hubspot.com by clicking on a link from an external domain (google.com).
• Scenario 2: A visitor goes to twitter.com/hubspot and clicks on a link from a tweet that brings them to blog.hubspot.com. On HubSpot's blog page, they click on a link in the menu to view www.hubspot.com. This is considered 1 visit by HubSpot.
  • Even though the visitor viewed two different pages on hubspot.com, their interactions count as 1 visit. This is because they reached blog.hubspot.com by clicking on a link from an external site (twitter.com) for 1 visit but reached www.hubspot.com by clicking on a link within the same domain (hubspot.com) which is not a separate visit. 
• Scenario 3: A visitor goes to google.com and does a search for "inbound marketing advice". They click on a search result and view www.hubspot.com. Then, they click on a link on www.hubspot.com that brings them to twitter.com/hubspot. From HubSpot's Twitter page, they click on a link from a tweet that brings them to blog.hubspot.com. This is considered 2 visits by HubSpot.
  • The visitor had 1 visit to www.hubspot.com from the external domain (google.com) and had 1 visit to blog.hubspot.com from the external domain (twitter.com). This totals 2 visits.

Page view

A page view is when a page on your site is loaded by a browser. HubSpot counts a page view every time the HubSpot tracking code is loaded.

• Scenario 1: This example would count 1 page view for www.hubspot.com.
• Scenario 2: This example would count 2 page views: 1 page view for blog.hubspot.com and 1 page view for www.hubspot.com.
• Scenario 3: This example would count 2 page views: 1 page view for www.hubspot.com and 1 page view for blog.hubspot.com.

Note: Because HubSpot counts a page view every time the tracking code is loaded, if a single page is refreshed multiple times by the same visitor - each refresh would count as its own page view.

What is the difference between visitors, visits, and page views?