Demystifying ‘Hits’
When talking to new clients who already have a website, I often hear something along the lines of, “My webmaster says I am already getting hundreds of hits on my website every week.”
Then I ask them what they mean by ‘hits’ and inevitably they confuse the term ‘hits’ with ‘visitors’ to their website, as if a ‘hit’ is a person looking at their website.
This is not the case, and if your webmaster has really told you this, you really need to look around for another one.
What are ‘hits’
When a person surfing the internet comes across your website, the first thing that happens is that the server hosting your website receives a request to ‘serve’ or display the requested web page to the person’s browser, which could be Internet Explorer or another program used to view internet pages.
Web pages are normally a page of text encoded in HTML format, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, which is an internet standard allowing different browsers to identify the best way to display a web page.
Most web pages consist of much more than just an HTML document, comprising also of graphics, and possibly other media, such as sound, flash or video files. When that web page is displayed, further requests are made to the server to ‘serve’ or display the included graphics. You will notice when some web pages load, some of the graphics may appear after the text of the page. This is because the HTML page has loaded and further requests have then been made to the server to show the graphics.
Every single component included in the web page, registers as a ‘hit’ on the server. So if a web page has 10 images in it, one single visitor looking at that web page will register as – you’ve guessed it – eleven hits on the server, one for the page and ten for the images.
Some web pages consist of many more than 10 images, and some of the images may be tiny. It’s quite possible for one visitor looking at one web page to register as a hundred ‘hits’ on the server. So if your webmaster tells you that you are receiving hundreds of ‘hits’ each week to your website, what does that mean?
Not a lot! The important statistic is how many ‘unique visitors’ your website is receiving. This is a much more accurate reflection of how many people are actually looking at your website. If you can’t access this information, then you are working in the dark - ‘hits’ are irrelevant.
Here is an example of some statistics from a website.
You can see than on July 1st, the website received 209 'Visits', very different from the 2393 'hits'
Some of them visited more than once, indicated by the 'Number of visits' being slightly higher. The 'Hits' is much higher at 70,229 indicating that on average, each page comprised of around 7 objects, six of which may have been graphics for example.
Unique Visitors
Even using ‘the number of ‘unique visitors’ to a website is not flawless. Every computer or computer network accessing the internet has a unique number or IP address. This may change each time the computer or network reconnects, but it will always be unique. When that computer visits your web page, the host server records the IP address of the visiting computer. So if that computer leaves your site and comes back again later that day, the second visit will not register as a ‘unique visitor’, but just a ‘visit’.
This system, although the best method of calculating the number of visitors to your site, is flawed in four ways.
- If the computer is used by more than one person, for example in an internet café – a second person viewing your website will not be counted as a unique visitor. Even though the person is different, the IP address is still the same.
- If a person looks at your website from their office computer, and then goes home and looks again at your website from their home computer – this would actually be recorded as two ‘unique visitors’ – even though only one person has looked at your website.
- If the computer is part of a network sharing an internet connection - Most office computer networks receive their internet through a single connection. With a network, the only IP address that the website will record is the single IP address of the network. There could be over 1000 computers on that network, and 300 of the computer users could be looking at your website, but it will only record one ‘unique visitor’.
- Cacheing. This is a procedure used by some internet providers to alleviate some of the speed bottlenecks when you are browsing the internet. In simple terms, if you view a website, behind the scenes, your internet provider may use more than one computer to look at the website on your behalf – before sending the web page to your browser. This single visit by you may result in multiple, perhaps 3 or 4 ‘unique visitors’ to the website.
Conclusion
So you can see, even ‘unique visitors’ is not a failsafe way to identify how many people view your website, but it is the most accurate way we have.
An experienced web master can use all of the statistics information to identify what is really happening.
Even ‘unique visitors’ are not necessarily a good way to tell how well your website is doing. Separating visitors who arrived at your website for the right reason, from those who arrived at your website for an entirely different reason will be covered in a separate article.