I’ve been something of an internet entrepreneur since the early days of the web, developing a variety of online projects, some more successful than others. In that time I’ve never ceased to marvel at the pace of change and the sophistication of new net developments.
One factor has remained depressingly the same though. From dial-up to superfast mobile broadband, the popularity of one measure of website traffic still hangs around in the public mind: Hits.
Only today I’ve seen the traffic to the new Police.uk site quoted by newspapers and the broadcast media in hits. The Scilly Isles are trending on Twitter because Prince William and Kate are thought to be eyeing up Scilly for their honeymoon — not surprising really as some or all of it is owned by William’s father, the Prince of Wales, aka the Duke of Cornwall, and will one day be his. The Scilly Isles website has had its visitations quoted by the media in hits.
Oh, come on, this is the most inaccurate measure of website traffic you could possibly employ and constitutes a fraud on the public. Here’s a simple primer for the hitsters:
Different measures of website traffic
Hits: Counts every object on the screen you land on — every picture, widget, block of text, graphic and whatnot. Almost always a huge overstatement of traffic.
Pageviews: Often used by advertisers as it accurately portrays the “click” potential of ads, rather than exact traffic volume.
Visits: Some people visit more than once a day. Having clicked on an ad once, it’s unlikely they will do so next time round, so this is not much used by advertisers.
Unique Visitors: This is now considered the most finely-tuned pointer to the level of traffic accessing a website page. However, it’s not measured directly, but by an algorithm involving other statistics. Awstats, an industry-standard stats gatherer, supplies only monthly figures for uniques for that reason.
One company relies on clicks registered on its toolbar application. Since the app will be used mainly by geeks, tech sites come out well ahead.
There are many ways of compiling website traffic statistics, some proprietary to individual businesses, but the whole field is anything but dependable.
One thing’s for sure, “hits” are totally redundant and tell the enquirer very little that the “bandwidth” stats don’t. They are used only by the technically illiterate, or by those who want deliberately to inflate the traffic to their sites.
Perhaps our cuddly coalition should make it a fraud offence to quote traffic in hits on commercial websites, since it’s clearly hitting well below the belt.
John Evans
