Website Statistics - ‘Hits’ are NOT ‘Visitors’!
by matt @ 2:19 pm. Blogged under Web Hosting, Banner Advertising, Web Design & Usability
I’m getting sick and tired of seeing journalists reviewing new websites and still referring to the number of ‘hits’ a website is receiving; it’s relatively meaningless data and does NOT mean ‘visitors’. Back in 1998 I thought technology editors might wake up to this by 2006 but it seems not. A hit is recorded in a server log file for every single file downloaded per page viewed on a website - this includes images like jpegs and gifs, .txt, PDF files and page includes themselves. Just opening this blog’s home page for example causes you to make around 50 hits. To give this some perspective let me put it this way - Firetop has received 106,463 hits in August - a journalistic field day! However, the number of visits has been a lot less at 2,118 from only 1,141 unique visitors.
Clearly, if you’re considering buying advertising, ‘hits’ is not a good metric to consider. Instead, at a basic level, you should be considering total page views, visitors and unique visitors. Only then will you be able to tell whether a website is worth spending money on with your banners, links or content. If possible try and take a look at the referring search terms which are also picked up by a website’s log files, this will tell you a bit about the website’s audience.
In August there have been 348 different search terms bringing visitors into Firetop, some of the more popular searches in Google, Yahoo and MSN are:
microsoft online svcs
budweiser fantasy football
roller disco kings cross
konstam restaurant
rehoming dogs
bosphorus cardiff
horsham superbowl
mr t lookalike london
Good to know that my ramblings are not going unread…
Firetop Ltd has a dedicated server for hosting websites. The hardware is managed by Rackspace as well as being monitored by my Systems Administrator and I. We receive SMS alerts if the server is down for longer than fifteen minutes. All files are backed up daily. If you have a website that needs hosting then give me a shout to see if I can offer you a competitive price. Hosting includes free use of the AWStats web traffic analysis application - so you can tell the difference between your hits and your visitors!
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