Counting Hits

I recently overheard this conversation:

Webmaster: We had 5,000 hits last month!

Site Owner: Wow, that's great. I wonder why we didn't get any inquiries or book any weddings?

"Hits" is a term casually thrown around and creates confusion implying that hits are real people.

Hits are not real people.

They are not real brides and grooms and hits can't make inquiries or buy your products and services. So, for all intents and purposes, hits are useless.

A hit is a technical term that describes the processing activity of your hosting server. If you have a web page with ten images on it, a bride visiting that page will create 11 hits: one when the page is requested and one for each image. As you can see, and this is just one page, one visitor can create a lot of hits very fast.

Hits are created when images are loaded, when scripts are loaded, when the page code is loaded, and when a variety of other services are provided by your hosting server.

If your webmaster talks about hits, ask them do they mean visitor sessions. Ask them if they mean real people. Webmasters love talking about hits because it's always a number higher than visitor sessions - and that mistakenly implies your traffic is better than it actually is.

What You Should Do: Change your mindset and think "visitor sessions" and not hits. If your webmaster doesn't know the difference, it's time to find a new webmaster. Don't be concerned with the total hits, a number that is found in your website statistics. Instead, monitor and track visitor sessions and unique visitor sessions. These are real brides and grooms and what you should be concerned with.

Related Articles

·  10 Reasons To Join My ADVANTAGE Program