Hit counter showing phantom hits? Or is it robots?

I have google analytics installed on my site and it seems to be pretty accurate - I have had friends in different states visit the site and each one has shown up on analytics. Now, when I check the report, I am showing 8 people have visited my site, and that number has remained constant, I am not advertising or putting my site out there in any way yet, so no strangers are visiting.

The issue I have is that, regardless of the lack of visitors, my hit counter is going up, up and up. It is currently at over 3500 hits. I am not visiting my actual shops page, just the admin section (With a few exceptions to check that something was changed correctly.)

So I can only assume that either 1) The hits are going up because of robots like google and other search engines are indexing my site which is not shown on analytics, or 2) When I add products and such in admin, hits are being counted.

Anyonw able to explain what exactly is happening here?

Also, not sure exactly how the session counter works, but I'm showing this:

06/16/2014 864 - 2214
06/15/2014 323 - 372
06/14/2014 283 - 341
06/13/2014 11 - 39
06/12/2014 18 - 32
06/11/2014 5 - 13
06/10/2014 5 - 9
06/09/2014 17 - 26
06/08/2014 5 - 26
06/07/2014 2 - 5

As you can see, the number on 6/16/2014 is massive (compared to the rest) yet these are not visitors to the site, analytics confirms there was only 1 visitor on that day, and that was me checking an item.

The hit counter fires whenever someone visits your storefront's main index.php file ... which drives everything on your storefront.

Obviously nobody here can tell you exactly who is triggering that. I'm only telling you how/when it happens. You and your host can inspect apache server logs and/or your host's analytics tools to determine more.