The term “hit” (as in web hit/web site hits) is often used inaccurately. You might hear someone say that their website received ten thousand hits. But what does that mean? It might mean that their web site was visited by ten thousand people or maybe it was visited ten thousand times. But one person could visit a web site ten thousand times. Web servers logs and analytical tools consider a “hit” to be any request made for a file. (e.g. Every image that loads on your screen is a “hit.”) One web site visitor can easily trigger dozens of hits to web server. So you can see why the term “hit” is a very imprecise and ultimately useless term.
When we talk about web site traffic, what really interested in are unique visitors and pageviews.
Unique Visitors
It’s not enough to measure how many visits/visitors your site receives because one person can visit a web site multiple time. Generally web traffic is discussed in terms of “unique visitors” over a period of time.
Your web site could receive an average of 1000 unique visitors a day, but that doesn’t mean you have 30,000 (1000 x 30 days) unique visitors a month. Many of your visitors could be “return visitors” who frequent you web site a couple time a week. Web traffic logs/analytics can track how many unique visitors your web site receives in a day, week or month so you can better understand the nature of you web traffic.
Pageviews
Everytime someone loads a page from you website, it counts as a “pageview.” You can divide the number of pageviews by the number of unique visitors (for any given period of time) to figure out your pageview/visitor ratio. This information is helpful for understanding how people use your web site.
Scenario: You have a popular online store with disappointing sales. Your data reveals that on average, every visitor views 20 web pages on your site. This may suggest several things
- Your customers spend a lot of time browsing your site, but they can find anything they are looking for.
- Your customers are overwhelmed by the options available to them and can’t narrow them down to make a choice.
- Your web site is not attractive potential customers, but rather, window shoppers who are not in the market for what your selling.
There could be other possibilities, but there’s no formula for figuring what’s the correct answer. All you can do is interpret the data that you have as best as you can so you can fine tune your web site and/or marketing.