For some of the newer members of the fictionpress, the idea of Hits and Visitors are to allow the writer, within a quick glance, to see if their work has been read by anyone else.

There is of course some confusion between how to separate both a Hit and a Visit among some new members (and those who find anything technological advanced difficult).

First off, to see such information you merely have to hover over the Traffic tab selecting the different options allows you to see both Hits and Visits of either your profile, your stories, your forum and your community.

Down below you are given a graph of your stats: (example below);

The Hits are represented by the blue bars, the Visits or Visitors are represented in gold.

Visits are as you would think, the number of times a page is visited by each browser. However this does not mean that the person who clicked on your story has read it… In fact with the new 403 error running around, most writers’ stats will be most unreliable. Seeing as Hits continues to count how many times that  web-page was accessed. Say I went to your story and refreshed the page another four times.

You would then have 5 Hits on that one page. You however only have one Visitor or Visit as it were. In the end Visitors are more helpful, and are a more efficient way to make sure your work is being read by others. This is because a visitor is recorded by what I.P address is accessing that one web page, and so refreshing it doesn’t record another Visit because that I.P address (per say) has already been used.

Should one person read your fiction ten times: you will still only gain one visitor.

However it is also the same on the flip side. If you have a high number of Visitors and a low number of Hits it shows that a lot of people are coming to read your fiction but aren’t staying to continue on.

Try to balance out the Hits and Visitors stats. Most try to keep aiming for higher Visits.