Views are different ways of looking at the same set of hits; they all show the same traffic, but they show different aspects of the traffic. For instance, one view can show you which pages were hit most, or which directories. Others can show you which domains brought the most traffic, or which referrers (advertisements, search engines, and links on other sites) brought the most hits. They can show you who logged in, what web browser or operating systems they used, when they visited, what what they searched for in the search engine that brought them. It can show you which pages they entered at, which pages they left from, and all the pages in between.

It is important to realize that though Sawmill only has a few dozen views, that does not mean that it can only generate a few dozen reports. Sawmill can generate an almost infinite number of different reports, because the view is not the only thing that determines what shows up in the report. Equally important are the Filters, which you can set however you want to limit which data you see. For instance, you can set a filter so you see only data in January, or you can set one so you only see hits on a particular directory, or both. There are almost infinite possibilities with the filters, and for each possible filter, you can see all the views. For instance, if your filters are set to show hits on January, you can click "Top days" to see the top days in January, or you can click "Top operating systems" to see which operating systems were used in January. Most tools can only show you a few dozen reports-- Sawmill can show you trillions.