Terminology Poll: Sessions, Visits & Visitors

Our lifetime summary stats allow you to keep track of the number of Page Views, Unique Visits and Returning Visits since you added your project to StatCounter. These stats are independent of your normal log size, have no storage limit and are recorded on a daily basis, allowing you to see weekly, monthly, quarterly and yearly totals.

If a visitor to your website has 5 page views in the morning, and returns to your website later that day for another 3 pageviews, we record this as 2 Unique Visits for that day. On another day, if you have 2 different people viewing your site in the morning, this would also be recorded as 2 Unique Visits.

Recently we’ve been working on adding a new stat to record distinct visitors to your site, so that in the above example, you’d see 1 visitor for the first day and 2 visitors for the second day.  The terminology between ‘Visits’ and ‘Visitors’ could be confusing though, so we are proposing to rename ‘Unique Visits’ to ‘Sessions’ in advance of adding the new stat. Let us know what you think in the poll below!

Current: Unique Visits (New Visitors stat will be in pink)

blog-unique-visits

 

Proposed: Rename Unique Visits to Sessions

blog-sessions

Note: Returning Visits hasn’t been shown in these screenshots, but it would likely be renamed to Returning Sessions.

 

We’d really love your feedback about what terminology you like the best and find easiest to understand. Please post your preferences in the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Pick your terminology!

View Results

Loading ... Loading ...

[Update: Thank you for all the great feedback so far. It’s a difficult decision and it’s very helpful to hear your thoughts on the matter. Please keep the feedback coming.]

121 Comments

  1. sometimes improvments are not needed but are done to appease the sites workers who have to keep it fresh and relevant. I understand this need. People catch onto new phrases very quickly just as they catch on to new windows editions or new iphones.

  2. “Sessions” is just confusing and has specific meaning. Leave it the way it is…it’s not broken!

  3. I think “session” is better than “Unique visitors” since a session means a single user who may have viewed a web site page(s) one or more times using the same cookie sent to the server. This change will be nice.

  4. Keep visits. “Sessions” doesn’t seem to apply to transitory visitors who click through Google images or Google searches, then go. They are visits, not sessions. “Visit” covers everything from a click-through to a “session.” Thanks.

  5. Please keep Unique Visitors! That’s what they are right? It’s a very descriptive term and it makes sense to the lay person too! Don’t try to be like Google Analytics. The whole reason we use Statcounter is because it is NOT Google Analytics. If we want “sessions” we will use GA right?

  6. On our old web host homestead they had a projected hits per day. Do you guys offer this it would be nice Thank You, Loren

  7. I would just like your graphs to display correctly again. Ever since you started asking poll info, it seems as though the graphs disappear in Chrome and when they display, the fonts are archaic.

  8. Well, you couldn’t be the first people ever considering this in the history of the web… So what is the convention? What is the industry-standard terminology and definitions?

    Don’t break those by making up your own names and titles. You’ll quickly become irrelevant and confusing.

    So while a poll might seem fun, please stick with standard conventions instead.

  9. No, no, no! The name used in the USA is “unique visits,” not “sessions.” Please do NOT change. If you do we will still call it unique visits for our purposes but your firm will be out of touch, in my opinion.

Comments are closed.

Try Statcounter free for 30 days

No credit card required. Downgrade to the free plan anytime.

Try it for FREE!