Ok, so I've looked at a few references on the web for the differences between page views and page visits, but don't really understand which is the most important number to report.

Visit - Is someone who comes to your Web site and looks around a bit. They may go to one page or they may go to 100 pages, but they're still only visiting once.
View - Is how many pages were seen by that visit


For example, I want to find the number of times that a pdf has been looked at on our website for January 2009 until the present date.

When digging up the numbers for a .pdf I see that there are
975 visits, but 2,310 page views.

What I don't understand is how there could be 974 visits to this specific pdf (a specific file link on our website), but 2,310 page views....

It's all a little confusing to me, can someone steer me in the right direction?

This should help you:

http://www.opentracker.net/en/articl...-pageviews.jsp

Okay, so a page VISIT is an actual visit to the pdf right? And a page view comprises all of the graphics and images and hits that are sent from the browser?

...So if that's true, then a VISIT is the number I am looking for if I just want to find out how many times users looked at the .pdf then?

visits are unique requests for a page.

views are each page access including page refresh and reloads

a hit is a HTTP request for ANY resource (.js, .css, images) from another page.

Okay, I think I've got it now.

Thanks!