Web Marketing - Stats issues -The Folly of Hit Counting
Date: 3 April 2008

Many people take great pleasure in quoting the number of "hits" that their web site gets.

Normally they are trying to express to others how many people (actually other computers) are visiting their web site. In some cases they have just confused the terminology. However if they really are quoting "hits", this is not the appropriate measure to be using for expressing the number of visitors to a site.

A hit is not a measure of the number of sessions, visitors, or users who visit your site. It is generally a much higher figure.

So what is a hit?

Hits is actually a measure of the number of items on your web pages that have been viewed, not the number of "visitors" to a site.

In short, and very simplistically:

Every page downloaded records a hit. Also any image on a page will register as one hit. (some other things also count too, like file sizes)

So if a visitor views one page of your site, and that page has 14 images on it, it will register approximately 15 "hits" – one for the page and 14 for the images. You may think you are getting a large number of visitors, but in fact you are not.

A site with a low number images will record less hits per visitor than one with lots of images. The average number of hits per page is apparently around 15.

So a visitor coming to a site may record as 1 visitor = 1 page viewed = 16 hits.

If "hits" is important to you, and you want to increase this, it’s easy - just increase the number of images on your pages!! Unfortunately, it probably won’t result in more sales and bookings for you because the same number of people (computers) are still visiting!

In future newsletters we will tell you about those figures that are important – visitors, sessions, unique visitors, repeat visitors, and page views.

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