What do statistics MEAN?

[Chorus Webmaster]

I've been collecting Feedburner stats for several years and am now on my second version of the podcast.  I routinely download the Excel data to report to my group on podcast uses.

I've learned that "enclosure download" means somebody actually downloaded a file.

I've learned that a "hit" is when my podcast is loaded in a browser. 

I believe that "subscribers" are people who follow my podcast in a feed reader.

But I also get regular stats on "item views" and "item clickthroughs" and I can't find ANY explanation of how these differ from "hits."

Since other people have asked similar questions here and been ignored, I don't have much hope of answers, but if you don't ask the question, the answer is always no.

[Maks Verver]

You're right about most of these. Item clickthroughs are perhaps the simplest to explain: they occur whenever an item link is fetched. This happens when a user clicks on the headline of a news article, for example. For podcasts, users are less likely to click item links; instead, they just download the enclosed media (or rather, their Podcast player does this for them).

Item views are counted whenever a user has been presented with the rendered HTML content of an item. This is useful since some RSS viewers only show the item headlines without the content, or they only show the last few items. In those cases, only the items that are actually shown are counted. This feature relies on loading an external image that's appended to the item content by FeedBurner. RSS readers don't always load external images, so this number may be a little lower since those views are not recorded.

 - Maks.