Everytime I hear someone talk about how many ‘hits” their website gets, I have to stop and wonder. Are they misusing the term or are they trying to deceive?
Since most people have no intention to deceive, they are probably just using the wrong term. But there are exceptions; those who intentionally use inflated stats for their own aggrandizement.
Why would someone want to deceive you or me about the number of visitors to their site? As so often is the case, it comes down to money. The more traffic a website gets, the more it can ask for advertising or other services.
For instance, a website owner can charge more to place an ad or item if he can show more traffic. If a web designer can show that she is drawing big traffic numbers to a website, her value goes up.
So, what’s wrong with ‘hits’?
When counting web traffic, three common terms are used, each of them measuring something different. In A couple of things you need to know about website stats, I stated “‘Hits’ are the most misleading and worthless stats on a web log” and showed an example of how 89 pageviews can turn into 1,171 ‘hits.’
Since pageviews represent people and most ‘hits’ represent some other, non-human page element, the problem is one of who your business serves – people or elements. If your business is like mine, it’s people who pay the bills.
How would you like to pay for 1,171 of something and only receive 89?
Alright, let’s explain the three main terms used to describe web traffic. You may have seen this before, but sometime seeing it again in different words helps clarify it.
Sessions – A session is initiated when a visitor enters your website. The session ends when they leave the website or when the session times out. The session can time when a visitor enters your site, and walks away from the computer without actually leaving your website. The we web server has a timing mechanism and when the visitor stays beyond that time with no activity it times them out and ends the session. You’ve probably had this happen when you logged on to a website (maybe the bank), got distracted and then returned to the web page to find yourself logged out. A ‘unique’ visitor is one who initiates a new session. One person can initiate more than one session in a day if the web server it set to time them out quickly.
Pageviews – A pageview is recorded whenever you visit a web page. So a visitor to your website who visits several pages can record several pageviews in a single session. Your sessions and pageviews counts, along with the stat that tells you how long the average session lasted are very valuable stats in helping you determine the value of a website visitor, whether for advertising purposes or for your own analysis.
Hits – A ‘hit’ s recorded every time a web page or an element of a web page is loaded into your browser. That means the web page counts as a ht as well as every element of that web page including images, javascripts, stylesheets or anything else the page calls. Those with an interest in inflating this statistic can also pre-load images – even though they never appear on the page, they are counted as ‘hits’. That’s how 89 pages viewed produced 1,171 ‘hits’ as mentioned above. For most purposes, ‘hits’ are meaningless.
When someone quotes ‘hits’ stats to you, look at it with suspicion, not necessarily for the the intent as much as the lack of knowledge. Ask them for the ‘people’ stats of sessions and pageviews. If they can’t or won’t supply those, take your business elsewhere.
I’ve never received an order or a visit from a photo or a javascript. It’s the people that count. Make sure you are counting the people and you’ll always get your money’s worth of value.