Like most companies these days, we track various measurements of our website (often referred to as “web analytics” or “metrics”) in order to gauge whether what we’re doing on our site is effective. People ask all the time “how many ‘hits’ do you get day?” (or month, year, etc.). That’s understandable since, from the early days of the web, hits were one of the easiest statistics to track. But what is a “hit” exactly? And are they even important?

All too often, the website measure of “hit” is given too much importance. With today’s analytics software, it’s easy to track a wide variety of data that provide insight on a website’s effectiveness, including more relevant measure of a how many Page Views or Unique Visitors it receives. Here’s a quick breakdown of the differences in these terms:

HIT:
Sometimes called a page hit. A hit is recorded any time any item, such as a web page, a graphic, or any other supporting file is requested from a from a site’s web server. For example, if a visitor to your site calls up a web page with some text and four graphics, five hits are recorded: one for the page (HTML file) and one for each of the four graphics. Since web pages today often contain many graphics and have numerous supporting files, the number of “hits” a site gets is not a good indication of it’s popularity, and certainly not of its usefulness.

PAGE VIEW:
Every time a web page is viewed, one page view is recorded. For example, If someone visits your home page, a home listing page, and a detail page for a listing, three page views would be recorded. Page views are often used in online advertising, where advertisers use the number of page views a site receives to determine where and how to advertise. Essentially, the number of page views you get tells you how many eyeballs are seeing your site. Generally, the higher this number, the more people like what you have to say or sell.

UNIQUE VISITOR:
Different from a site’s hits or page views—which are measured by the number of files that are requested from a site—unique visitors are measured according to their unique IP address on the computer they’re using to browse the Internet. IP addresses are are like online fingerprints that identify a specific computer (but not a specific person…remember that often multiple people will use the same computer!). Once a new IP address is recorded, that visitor is labled as 1 unique visitor, no matter how many pages they go to on the site during their visit that day. For this reason, tracking unique visitors is one of the best ways to measure the popularity of your site.

So why are hits often cited by people trying to tell you how great their website is? Easy! They’re usually a really high number that sounds quite impressive. And since many consumers don’t understand the difference between a hit or a unique visit, crafty salespeople will quote the highest number they can find. So don’t be mislead when companies talk about “hits”. Always ask for the number of unique visitors and page views (and start tracking them on your own site). These are the true determining factors of a popular website. Hits are the snake oil of the Internet!

Posted by: Kurt on March 29th, 2007 | Filed under: General