Back in the day, we talked a lot about “hits” as a measure of a site’s success.  Of course, “hits” is a problematic term.  What was meant by a “hit” could be up to the individual site owner (images included or not, scale of the site, etc).  The industry settled on page views as a good metric.  Essentially, let’s only count requests for HTML pages.  Then there are visits.  Visits are (finally?) coming into vogue as a tracking measurement by the big industry players:

We wanted to get more into engagement and intensity of usage, and help better understand who the audience is,” Jack Flanagan, EVP at comScore Media Metrix, told ClickZ. By measuring the frequency with which a person views content, the metric aims to illustrate a component of user engagement.
Visits will augment the “frequency” metric, which counts the average number of days per month a user visits, and “unique visitors,” which counts the total number of people who visit in a month. Its advantage over “unique visitors” is that it can show more details on user engagement, Flanagan said.
For instance, a visitor that comes to a site once in a month will be counted as one unique visitor, as will a visitor that comes to the site every day that month. With visits, that user can be shown to be a loyal visitor, who visits the site multiple times a day. The visits metric will also be used to calculate “average visits per visitor,” which will show return visits per unique individual during the course of a month.
Source: Can ‘Visits’ Replace Pageviews?

There has always been a bit of a problem with “visits” as a metric.  A “visit” is a calculated estimate.  See it’s really hard to accurately track people coming to your site.  Without getting into the messy details, visits are a real back of the envelope kind of calculation.  Good thing for us, however, we’ve pretty much agreed on the “calculation” so we’re good.

I’d like to see an extension of using page views and visits and use page views/visit.  This is a really interesting metric it gives you an idea of how interesting your content is.  Do people come and leave or hand around and read.  Blogs, well, blogs are usually in the 1-2 ish range.  Read a post, leave.  Now for commerce and informational sites you need to be in the 2-4 range.  You need people to be going from page to page.

Okay, okay this is a little geeky.  I guess I should be happy that visits are finally getting their due.