9,000,000 Hits Since Tuesday

You've seen the claims before - "Advertise on our web site we get a thousand hits per day...", "...four million hits last month...", and so on.

What do they mean by "hits"?

Before we go on, you should be aware of two things:

1. A hit does not equal a visitor.

2. There is currently no method of tracking visitors to a site with complete accuracy.

First, understand that there is no one widespread definition of the term "hit". It is generally understood among webmasters that a "hit" is a request for a file from a web server. A file can be a web page, graphic, icon, banner, sound file, or otherwise. As a person enters a web site, their browser places a request to the web server for the main page. The page may have several icons, graphics, etc. on it. The server delivers these as well, so that single request from the end user created several "hits".

Here's an example:

You visit a site at http://domain.com/index.html. This page has a image of the company logo at the top, 4 icons, and has background music playing as you enter the site. Merely by accessing this company's main page you have generated 7 hits or file requests from their server (1 for the web page index.html, 1 for the logo image, 4 icon images, and 1 sound file = 7 hits). You like what you see, so you navigate around their site, visiting eight other pages in the process. If each of these eight additional pages each have 5 graphics, you have just generated another 48 hits - 55 hits altogether.

Now if you return to a page you just visited, in most cases the web browser will pull the files from your hard drive cache, rather than request them from the server. This speeds up the process of displaying pages and will not create additional hits. However, many pages on the Web today are created dynamically each time they are loaded. Requests for these pages will create more hits.

As you can see, one person visiting a site can generate dozens, if not hundreds of hits.

For people just cruising the Web, this means nothing. However for an business wishing to get the maximum possible exposure for their advertising dollar, it becomes vitally important.

Here a Banner, There a Banner....

Let's say you place a banner on a site claiming 1,000,000 hits per month. Your banner costs you $20 cpm (cost per thousand viewings) or $20,000. This is equivalent of paying $.02 for each viewing of your banner - or so you think.

In actuality the site does get one million hits per month - but an average visitor to their site generates 50 hits. So the one million hits quickly dissolves into only 20,000 visitors. Now you discover you are really paying $20,000 for 20,000 visitors, or a buck apiece at $1000 cpm! A little overpriced....

So as an advertiser how can you keep yourself from getting ripped off?

One - Make sure you understand how the site is defining "hits". Some will use the term to mean actual visitors; while improper use of the word, it does provide you with more meaningful data about how your money is being spent.

Two - Only pay for displays (or "impressions") of your banner ad, not what their site claims to get. Ideally the site should have banner tracking software in place to monitor your banner stats.

Three - Know that if your banner will be displayed on several pages of the same site, one person may view your banner more than once - each viewing counting as a delivered impression. This effectively raises your cpm.

Just How Popular is My Web Site?

Web sites don't pay for the number of visitors, but the same information applies regarding hit counting. Even if your traffic reporting software counts page accesses only, it will just show general activity on a site and not the number of visitors. So how to find out as closely as possible the number of individual people who visit your site?

Method 1: Use a common image on every page. This image should be small, and located near the top of each page. As a visitor hits the first page, they will load the image. Each additional page they visit also has the image - but it is pulled from their hard drive and not the web server. The end result is each image loading is more or less one visitor. Well almost: anywhere from 5-12% of the visitors will surf your site with graphic loading turned off in their browser, so they won't be counted.

Method 2: This method is more accurate, as it takes information from the server logs and determines the number of unique domains that access your site. This is generally done by software installed on the web server, and provides you with information on your web site traffic either online or via e-mail reports (or perhaps both).

Hopefully this information sheds some light on those mysterious "hits".

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