Search Engine Optimisation

Know the difference between Web Hits and Web Visitors

Knowing the difference between Web Hits and Web Visitors is very important. You will always have many times more Web Hits than Web Visitors and quite often people will refer to the Web Hits when talking about how popular a site is or how well it does as far as web traffic is concerned.

How many times have you seen a Web Directory making claims of many hundreds of thousands of Hits - "Sign up for our Directory. We get 500,000 Hits a Month" We have all seen this. It looks impressive and although the site concerned probably does receive this amount of hits - It is however MISLEADING. This is a very clever marketing technique - Misleading people that don't understand the difference.

A Web Hit is counted for every element on a single Web Page. Let's say that a Web Page has 20 photos, 5 icons and 15 web site links. This totals 40 elements on that page alone, giving 40 Web Hits. In fact there are other elements on a Web Page that count as a hit, like Style Sheets and Scripts. Remember each file sent to a browser by a web server is an individual hit.

The main thing you need to know is that for every unique web site visitor, you get many times more hits.

When monitoring your Web Site Traffic, focus on the Visitors and the number of Page Views. Hits are an unreliable way to measure Web Traffic.

Pay particular attention to the number of Unique Visitors and more importantly the Returning Visitors. If your customers keep returning then you must be doing something right!