Renegade Personal Development | Internet Marketing

A reliable way to measure website traffic

HITS, PAGE VIEWS AND UNIQUE VISITORS!

One of the most widely misunderstood issues on the Internet is the difference between hits and unique visitors. If you asked people which is the more impressive statistic - 500 unique visitors a day or 100,000 hits a week? - Most would choose the latter. The answer is that both these figures could in fact represent the same thing.

Hits
If anyone who isn’t a network engineer mentions ‘hits’ to you, they’re probably trying to pull the cyberwool over your eyes. Hits are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single web page completely. The page document itself plus the various images on the page and any other media files embedded there all represent individual requests to the web server. Each of these requests is called a hit - a hit is a request to the server for a file not a page. So to summarise each file sent to a browser by a web server is an individual hit.

Hits are not in my opinion a reliable way to measure website traffic

In other words, the more images used in a page, the higher the hit count - so while hits may be a good indication of a graphics heavy webpage design, it doesn’t tell you much about traffic.

To give you an example of how misleading ‘hits’ are, consider a web page with 10 images (graphics) on it. One individual request to view that page would count as 11 hits - one hit for the HTML code that makes up the page and 1 hit for each of the 10 images ‘called’ from the server.

Page views
Similar to hits, page views are files requested from the server but are limited to the web pages themselves (i.e., HTM or HTML files, or Hypertext Mark-up Language files). While a little more concrete than hits, page views do not give specific information about surfers or their behaviour, for example, the length of time that they remained on a specific page. It is, however, a good indication of how well your site is received. If you are averaging more than 6 page views per unique visit you can consider yourself to be doing well.

Unique Visitors
I believe that a count of ‘unique visitors’ is the best way of determining your web site effectiveness. Unique visitors are tracked not according to the files they have requested but by their unique IP (or Internet Protocol) addresses, which are much like online fingerprints.

For example
If we have a site averaging 500 ‘unique visits’ a day and each visitor views four pages which each consists of seven images and one HTML file (representing eight hits) you will have a site ‘claiming’ 112000 Hits a week!!

500 visitors x 4 page views x 8 files (hits) x 7 days = 112000 HITS

As you can see, web design and Internet technology can be fraught with obstacles for the uninitiated. Armed with these facts you will, I hope, be able to make a more informed judgement about the services on offer and the claims made by potential suppliers.