Web analytics in the context of Similarweb

Active users is a software performance metric that is commonly used to measure the level of engagement for a particular software product or object, by quantifying the number of active interactions from users or visitors within a relevant range of time (daily, weekly and monthly).

The metric has many uses in software management such as in social networking services, online games, or mobile apps, in web analytics such as in web apps, in commerce such as in online banking and in academia, such as in user behavior analytics and predictive analytics. Although having extensive uses in digital behavioural learning, prediction and reporting, it also has impacts on the privacy and security, and ethical factors should be considered thoroughly. It measures how many users visit or interact with the product or service over a given interval or period. However, there is no standard definition of this term, so comparison of the reporting between different providers of this metric is problematic. Also, most providers have the interest to show this number as high as possible, therefore defining even the most minimal interaction as "active". Still the number is a relevant metric to evaluate development of user interaction of a given provider.

In web analytics and website management, a pageview or page view, abbreviated in business to PV and occasionally called page impression, is a request to load a single HTML file (web page) of an Internet site. On the World Wide Web, a page request would result from a web surfer clicking on a link on another page pointing to the page in question.

In contrast, a hit is any request made to a web server which includes not just the HTML page itself, but every single file the page needs to load. Therefore, there may be many hits per page view since an HTML page can contain multiple files such as images, videos, JavaScript, cascading style sheets (CSS), etc. Hits can therefore be an inflated number hence pageviews are more meaningful for readership metrics.