Confessions of a Salesman

HITS, PAGE VIEWS AND UNIQUE VISITORS!

Again this is not strictly anything to do with selling Internet leads but it does include some valuable points that anyone earning a living from the Internet should be aware of.

If I said my website had 100,000 hits per week most people would be impressed. It certainly sounds good.

On the other hand if I said I got 3,500 unique visitors per week, most people would be less impressed.

However, the truth of the matter is that both these statistics could in fact represent the same result.

Let me explain further:

Hits

If anyone who isn’t a network engineer mentions ‘hits’ to you, they are 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. In simple terms, a hit is a request to the server for a file not a page.

In other words, the more images used in a page, the higher the hit count. So while hits may be a good indication of poor page design, they won'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. (Please note I have somewhat simplified this example in order to explain the principle.

Page views

Like hits, page views are files requested from the server but are limited to the web pages themselves (ie 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 six 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 website’s 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 the technically-minded there can be disadvantages in this method also – as some ISPs use a different IP address for every file requested, thus making one visitor look like many – but we won’t go into that here.

For example: If a site averages 500 ‘unique visits’ a day and each visitor views four pages, each consisting of seven images and one HTML file (representing eight hits), the site could claim 112,000 hits a week!

500 visitors x 4 page views x 8 files (hits) x 7 days = 112,000 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 people selling you websites or offering web design services.

Winning With Internet leads

The Pros and Cons