Hit’s Versus Visitors – What Are Your Webstats Really Telling You About Your Website?

One of the most common queries I come up against time and time again from my clients is the confusion surrounding the difference between visitors and hits on sites. It’s a common misconception that is used to great effect in marketing and PR to dazzle target audiences with mid boggling statistics on the huge amount of hits a newly launched sites have received during its first month.

Working in the SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and New Media field as a whole for many years, this has long been a bug bare of mine and I hope to dismiss some of the myths surrounding it in the hope of educating consumers when deciphering their own webstats in the future.

First of all, Website owners should be most concerned with Visitors whom account for individual activity on a site. The difference between a Visitor and a hit is that a hit is created every time an action on a webpage is recorded or a page is loaded up.

For example logo’s, images, files, and graphics loaded as HTML, CSS and Java Script all create a hit when the page is loaded. This means that massive scores and counts can be created merely by one visitor navigating their way around the website depending on the amount of content on each page providing unrealistic totals.

It is also worth baring in mind that page counters are similarly misleading, as quite often they are set up to count page views, not unique visitors. Page counters are also susceptible manipulation, adding a new count every time the page is refreshed allowing webmasters to creative massive distortion in terms of actual recorded activity simply by continuously refreshing their site.

So there we have it, I hope that my mini rant about the ambiguous manner in which Webstats can be presented has helped to dispel some of the myths surrounding this issue. So next time you come across a press release boasting of hits instead of visitors you’ll know the score!
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