The Summary panel appears at the top of every page. It gives you a quick view of the activity on your site. It looks like this:
It consists of five sections. Each section has a number for the current period, a number for the previous period (smaller, in grey), and the percentage change between the two (in green or red, depending if the number has gone up or down).
Let’s look at each section in turn.
Hits count the number of times SlimStat has recorded a page being viewed. If one person views five pages, or if five people each view one page, that’s five hits. Other analytics software refers to them as page views or page impressions.
Visits are groups of hits. When one person views several pages on the site, their hits are grouped together into one visit. If they leave the site for more than 30 minutes, a new visit is made. If one person views five pages, that’s one visit. If five people each view one page, that’s five visits.
Unique IPs shows the number of different IP addresses that visited the site. One IP address can make multiple visits, and one visit can contain multiple hits. The number of unique IPs is likely to be higher than the number of unique people, because multiple people can share one IP address.
Hits ∕ day is simply the number of hits divided by the numbers of days in the month, to give an average number of hits per day. If you are viewing a single day’s report, this changes to the number of hits per hour. If you are viewing the current month (or the current day) it divides by the number of days (or hours) so far. This means that if you are near the start of the current month, you can still get a good idea of how many hits you are getting compared to the previous month, even though the entire previous month is likely to have a higher number of hits.
Visits ∕ day, similarly, is simply the average number of visits to the site each day.