Smart Advertising – Hits vs. Visitors
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I wrote this article several years ago and it’s gone missing from the site, so here’s a new version.
How many hits does your website get?
I see this question go by a lot and I wanted to address it to clear up the confusion.
Hits are not visitors. That’s the first thing you should know. You are a visitor. When you visit a website your browser “hits” the webserver for content. It says, hey, send me the page, the images, the little java applet in the sidebar there. And the Webserver returns all of that, logging each request as a hit.
Therefore every image on a page, and the page itself are logged as a hit. If you have 80 images on a page (not hard to do these days… even the tiniest image counts) then each time someone visits that page, the sites statistics raise by 81 hits. 80 images + 1 page = 81 hits.
This is a terrible statistic to go by as far as how much traffic a site is getting. Some sites pride themselves on having very few images (thus making pages load faster.) Other websites are nothing but a huge image sliced into hundreds of little pieces (to help the page load faster).
They may get the exact same number of users per month, say 1000 for easy math. The site with very few images, say 4, will return 5000 hits that month. (4 images plus the page = 5 x 1000 visitors = 5000 hits.)
The other site, with 149 images, will return 150,000 hits that month.
This makes it very difficult to know just how many people visit a site. Furthermore, some sites actually troll for hits, inviting people to come help them get a “million hits this month.”
So what do you ask for?
Unique visitors. These are the unique number of visitors that visit a site and this information is available via a good website statistics program. Any good site should have statistics to offer you. But make sure you ask for unique visitors, not hits!
Tags: advertising, hits, visitors