The Daily Record and Sunday Mail website has reported its best month ever in December.

According to the website, it had 2,123,001 unique visitors - making it the highest monthly readership total and a 50% increase on December, 2010.

It added that the website was read by more than 18.5million unique visitors in total in 2011 – a 32% rise on the 2010 figure.

Subsequent to the posting, a Daily Record reader asked: “Could you clarify what the numbers actually mean”.

Ewan Watt, the newspaper group’s digital editorial director, responded: “The 2,123,001 refers to the number of unique visitors to our site during December 2011 as recorded by the independent web analytics service Omniture.

“Monthly unique visitors are the industry standard in the newspaper website industry. Without going into details on this forum, our monthly page views are obviously considerably higher than the two million figure.

“Refreshing the page counts towards page views but not towards unique visitors.

“Visits to our motoring and jobs sections are counted separately from this figure.”