Beware How You Count Events!
I am aware that a large segment of the HIPPO community advocate visit based metrics, but honestly, one can get into trouble – big trouble – if one blindly adheres to “Visits are what count.” and apply visits like ketchup to every metric entree. In web analytics there are three basic tempos – page views, visits, and visitors (actions over multiple visits). Page views represent the raw vibrance of your web site – lots of visitor actions that are difficult at times to summarize and trend. So to gloss over the visitor churn and their propensity to reload or revisit pages, we often apply visits to metrics to put a wet blanket, metaphorically speaking, over the fire that raging in the page view traffic.
