Total vs. unique hits
 

anyone want to give me a rundown on total hits vs. unique hits and the general measurement of how each is achieved?

I see that conversion ratios of 1:500 to 1:1000 seem standard (although seeing some 1:250s as well), are these based on total hits or uniques?

Thanks in advance. I bow to you masters out there... working on becoming one of the club soon enough.

1:500 to 1:1000 as an average is definately based on uniques and not total raw hits.

With an honest count, 50-70% of the raw hits are uniques, although many programs show 30% or less uniques which is just a way to make conversions look better than they really are

so how do they measure a unique hit? I mean if I visited yesterday, does that mean I am unique today? what's the difference of the two?

I know it's a boring subject with no pictures, but I could seriously use an answer.... so BUMP

Maybe I should change the question to, how many times can I bump my own thread until someone answers the second part of my question?

Well, there isn't really a standard to define what's a unique, but the most common definition is a visitor with unique IP adress within 24h. So, the same IP again in given time range is a raw only. Proxies are treated the same way, so even 10 different visitors from the same proxy would count as 1 unique and 10 raws.

Most programs don't publish how they exactly count uniques, so there is a broad variety of different timeframes (some do 12h, some 48h, most in between), different ways to treat proxies. Some programs only count second page uniques, some join page uniques, it has become quite silly lately and it's impossible to really compare stats for different programs...

Stark. I thank you for the answer of apparently a very inexact science.