Website Confusion – What’s a Hit?

Website Confusion – What’s a Hit?

Facts About Website Hits, Visitors and Page Views
Based on reading many articles in newspapers, advertisements and hearing from salespeople we constantly see the use of the term “hits” relevant to how well a website performs. The reality is many people do not understand what this means and as a result the general public is lead to believe that “hits” is a huge factor with any given website. This is totally misleading and were hoping to educate the general public as to what’s important and what’s not.

The Real Definition Of Hit Is...
A record of every file sent to a browser by a Web server. Note: we didn't say every page sent...we said every file sent.

Every image in a page is a separate file. When a visitor looks at a page (i.e. a page view), they may see numerous images, graphics, pictures etc. and generate multiple hits.

For example, if you have a page with 10 pictures, then a request to a server to view that page generates 11 hits (10 for the pictures, and one for the html file). A page view can contain hundreds of hits. This is the reason that we measure page views and not hits.

Another example is if you loaded a Web page with 999,999 tiny graphics under a headline, and had one site visitor last month, your site would have had one million hits. Hits are not a reliable way to measure website traffic.

Additionally, there is a high potential for confusion here, because there are two types of 'hits'. The hits we are discussing in this article are the hits recorded by log files, and interpreted by log analysis. A second type of 'hits' are counted and displayed by a simple hit counter. Hit counters record one hit for every time a webpage is viewed, also problematic because it does not distinguish unique visitors.

Considerations – What Information Should You Use
Don’t ask your web agency how many hits your website is getting; it’s useless.

To better understand the general interest in your site, start by asking for the number of "unique visitors." The only downside to this statistic is that it measures people who arrived at a page on your Web site--that's it. They could have landed and left within seconds, but they're still unique visitors. In other words, you could have 100,000 unique visitors and still have no site interest.

That's why it's better to know the number of unique visitors and the average number of page views per visitor. That is far more meaningful than "hits" or "unique visitors" alone.

Whenever an organization wishes to print website statistics it should always be “unique visitors” and “page views”. If a website receives 1000 visitors per month and shows 4000 page views the average visitor is looking at four pages. This is what really counts.

As you can appreciate most of the general public is led to believe that “hits” is actually visitors and it’s simply not true. There are some people/companies that are deceptive when advertising their website traffic stating well over 1 million hits or what have you. This is simply not right and the general public needs to know. My guess is most are being honest and simply don’t know the difference and that’s why we felt this was important to share.

Sincerely, Jay Somerville, President, Webacom Media Corp.