I'm So Excited... I Got 1000 Hits!

[Dale King]

This morning, I received an e-mail from a new client. She was all excited because she had received 1000 hits on her website in her first week. She couldn't believe that a thousand people had discovered her website so quickly.

After examining her weblogs, I discovered that her 1000 "hits" was in reality 83 visits.

Unfortunately, I had to dampen her enthusiasm a bit by telling her the truth. She had not actually received a thousand visitors to her website. She received a thousand hits. There's a huge difference. Let me explain.

Let's suppose that you visit a website and click on a page that has nothing but text on it. That page of text would be considered "one" hit.

However, if that page had a graphic, that graphic would not conflate - meaning become one with the web page. Rather, it would remain separate from — but referenced in — the page so that it displays where it is intended to display. In other words, that one graphic on a page of text are two separate entities. Therefore, the page and the graphic equals two hits.

Expanding this example even further. Let's suppose you visited a page that had text plus 50 graphics. Again, those graphics would not conflate with the web page. Those 50 graphics on a page of text are considered 51 separate entities, and thus would equal 51 hits.

That's why you should never use website hits as a metric when measuring your traffic. It's just not a true barometer. A much better and more accurate measure of traffic are unique visitors. A unique vistor is the actual number of different people that visit your website.

For example, if a visitor leaves and comes back to your site ten times during the measurement period, that person is counted as one unique visitor. But the actual measurement would count as ten visits.

In closing, when measuring your traffic, don't count the number of hits your website receives. Instead, count unique vistors. That's a much more accurate metric.

Dale King

[FUN-GUYZ!]

Good article Dale. "Hits" should never be a selling point. I used to tear competitors up when a prospective client told me, "well, your competitor gets 30,000 hits a day and you only have 10,000".

We actually defined our "unique vistors" as 1 visit for every 48 hours. Meaning if you came to my site today, went back again at night, and then once more in the morning...you still only counted as one visitor. It worked very well for the type of site I ran, and when explained during my sales process, prospects loved the fact that we didn't inflate numbers.

Bravo!

[Dale King]

Good article Dale. Bravo!

Thank you very much, Fun-GUYZ!

Dale King

[Danielius]

Yep you´re right about that!

But can we expect that those "one time visitors" charts are reliable then?

THX in advance.

[Upperz]

Dale is right. I only look at a few things, and that is the unique visitors, the % returning visitors, and how long there are hanging in there :-)

[latinolive]

Dale,

Thanks for the explanation. I too had been confused about the difference between hits and visitors. Depressing at times. Hey, I found a great FREE article on a number of issues for young entrepreneurs in creating a business. I couldn't believe it when I found it at Business Start Up - Start Your Own Business. Great information and content. The article was written by two attorneys and I am so impressed that I am now telling everyone I know. Check it out.

[Dale King]

Thanks, everyone!

Dale King

[Warranties-For-Less]

Good points,

Yes, I fell for those promises of getting a million hits for X amount of money years ago, but like most, you live and learn, hits are useless, I want sales, and sales come from unique visitors, not hits.

Good luck to all, Mike