Website analytics – how many hits is a site getting.

[Robert Lambie]

there isn’t actually a way of doing this accurately from an external source.
even if you look at the small print disclaimers on your own website, you will see anomalies can and do happen even with those hosting your own website.

i think when you see the word "Hits" being used today to describe web traffic, its normally from someone with limited experience of websites.
my understanding is, In the past "a Hit = a Visit", its no longer that… well not with most Hosting service providers these days. (rough way to explain) a hit is a file download of some sort. so lets take UKSB homepage. we have say 20 images/pictures. this would be 20 files = 20 hits. every time the page is loaded, thats another 20 hits… something along those lines anyway…
my personal view is to just ignore this stat…

what you want to know is "Unique Visits".
Unique Visits are how most of the big hosts now calculate traffic.
websites like MySpace and the like have been slammed for only calculating/showing "Visits" NOT "unique visits".
e.g.
A Visit = a single person visiting a homepage.
A "unique Visit" = a person visiting a homepage then viewing a minimum of 2-3 other pages on that website. "only then" does that person get counted as a "unique visit"

The reason behind this method of calculating traffic is its more accurate to the websites "targeted audience".
e.g.
Someone Googles "Signs"
They land on "uksignboards.com"

at this point the visitor realises IF the site is what they are looking for.
If it is what they are looking for, they will proceed to click through various pages. when they do this, only then do they get counted as "a single unique visit"
if it isnt they will about turn and leave. This visit "is not" counted as a visit.
the reason for this is because the person looking for "Signs" may have been looking for a site on "sign language" or perhaps the film starring mel gibson called "Signs" (if you see what i mean?)

so in a nutshell, forget Hits or even single Visits and look at "Unique Visits".

as for Alexia and the like…. again, this is very much a bad way to monitor traffic. check the small print on alexia…
alexia gives traffic stats on websites "based on users of their toolbar" so its a bit like uksignboards.com telling you a site has no traffic because the sites traffic doesnt use our UKSB Sign toolbar, which would be ridiculous of course.
the credibility of alexia is because it has millions upon millions of users… but… i dont know anyone that uses the alexia toolbar, i know I don’t use it, do you? 😀
anyway… IF you type in a search based on a website with "very low or zero" traffic by Alexia toolbar users it returns very erratic bizarre calculations. i think Alexia even stipulate this error, or maybe i have read it via other web development sources. but that is apparently what happens.

anyway… hope this helps… 😀

[David Rogers]

Yes Rob, helpful 😀

Reason being my boss has been approached by a local company for advertising on their ‘dundeechannel(DOT)com’ website and I personally have difficulty believing their ‘visitor / hit’ numbers being from ‘unique users’ of in excess of 11,000 a day.

If I can essentially show the ‘real’ or a more accurate picture of the traffic (ie. potential audience) it’ll make the decision a ‘yeah’ or ‘neigh’.

As for Alexa – never use it since I got a load of sites listed on it years back (as you do) and that was it.

Cheers

Dave

[Nigel Hindley]

quote Robert Lambie:

so in a nutshell, forget Hits or even single Visits and look at “Unique Visits”.

anyway… hope this helps… 😀

Hi Rob,

I always thought and know many web designers that believe a unique visit or hit is a new customer rather than a recurring visitor?

Maybe there is a difference between a unique hit / Visit.

So take for instance a site I have – google analytics says 2000 visits and 1560 absolute unique visits – the bounce rate should be then the difference between 1560 and 2000?

This is going to change very much how i analyze my hits!

Nigel