Hits or Visitors?
A notorious misuse of statistics in the internet world is that of saying hits instead of the number of visitors to a website.
It’s an easy way to fool people - be vague in your terminology and you can sound like your website is far more successful than it really is. For example, I could cheerfully tell you that my personal site, Dave’s Gone Mental, generates around 60,000 hits per month. Great! And most people would think that means 60,000 people are coming to see my stuff and nonsense.
Sadly, the reality is rather more mundane than that. I receive about 6,000 distinct visitors per month - it’s not too bad really, but nothing like as impressive as the first number might sound.
So why the difference? Well hits, in web parlance, means the number of times something is requested from the server. When you load a page there will be one visit, and several hits as all the files needed for the page are requested by the browser. If you’re a visitor, you may also read several pages in one visit.
So what are the statistics that really matter? Visits, and pages viewed per visit are where it starts. If you have visitors from your marketing, but they view one page and promptly leave then perhaps they aren’t exploring your site very much. Alternatively, it could suggest that your site is effective and they get what they want immediately. Very quickly you’ll need to start analysing exit pages, time spent reading, and so on. You don’t necessarily need to convert many visitors into clients.
So next time you’re listening to people’s web-stats you can tell if they’re pulling a fast one or not….
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