wanderer,
With the greatest of respect to ES, the " hit " measurement is a meaningless one. No one uses it anymore.
To explain:
When you enter a web page address, the web browser sends a message to the web server where the web site is located that it wants a certain page and the web server receives that message and says " Okay bubba, here's your web page " and sends it on its way back to you across the internet. However, if your page has 10 images to load, your browser will reconnect with the web server 10 times, it will grab each image one at a time, each time registering a "hit".
Thinking about this a little with this new knowledge you now have, you could have a web page with 100 small images and it would register 100 hits from 1 visitor. If 100 people visit a single page, then it would have 10,000 "hits". A competing site could be much more efficient with design and have only 3 images, 500 visitors, and register only 1,500 "hits".
i.e.
100 visitors 10,000 hits
500 visitors 1,500 hits
Highly misleading, eh? People used to use the measurement because it can easily sound like an impressively large figure!
The correct measurement is page impressions and unique visitors. This shows how many individual page views were taken on the site as a whole (if this is rising either more people are viewing the site or perhaps the current users are viewing more posts, which you can also get an idea about by examing how long the average visitors stays for. "Stickiness"). The number of unique visitors helps determine that.
You can monitor how many pages each visitor views, even logging their path thru the site. This is often used to find flaws in the user experience. CDNow.com used this method to examine why many Japanese visitors were doing lots of searches but not buying. Turned out upon examining the path and search logs, they were typing in The Beatles but typing it in the way Japanese people hear it. It was wrong, but consistently spelt wrongly by all Japanese on the site. By viewing the logs they could see what was happening and plug the wrong spelling into the search engine to correct it on the fly and bring up The Beatles search for the wrongly spelt one when entered. Sort of working around human error in a helpful way behind the scenes..
Far more information than you wanted I'm sure, but as I'm a web developer I thought I should chime in!
Petey
wanderer wrote: what is a "hit"?
20,000 a day seems like a lot if i understand the term correctly (and i prolly don't).