Webstats - the Truth About Hits and Visitors

The Internet is an important tool for businesses across the globe. But with everyone competing in the online global market place, it’s vital that each business works hard to bring visitors to their website. Once the visitor is at the site, they need to keep them interested in order to convert that visitor into a sale.

If everyone is competing for web traffic, the collective name for visitors, then there is a huge market for those offering businesses the opportunity to improve the number of visitors that they get each day, week or month. Online advertising is a vast revenue creator. It’s important to understand just what an advertiser is offering you and what it means in real terms. Understanding Web Stats such as Google Analytics or Clicky is the key to measuring the success of your online advertising and marketing strategy.

When a new website is launched or a new product advertised via a site, there is often a colourful boast attached. ‘We’ve received 20,000 hits per day!’ they will claim. But there’s a problem. Hits and visitors are not the same thing. Hits are something entirely different from visitors.

Here’s how it works: A Hit occurs when a file on your website is requested from somewhere else. But if your webpage contains 49 graphics, a single visitor will create 50 hits. Each part of the file will register a hit. That means that 20,000 hits per day can actually translate into very few visitors if you have a highly complex site with lots of graphics and other elements.

A lot of web advertising campaigns are based on the number of hits on your site, but as hits are not counted in the same way as visitors, you could be wasting your money.

Examining your Unique Visitors gives you a much better way of measuring your current success. This statistic tells you how many new visitors came to your site during a specified period of time. If your unique visitors are low, but your hits seem high, you need to change your strategy because people aren’t visiting your site frequently enough to convert them into sales.

Some advertising companies work by the number of times your page has been viewed, these rather unsurprisingly are called Page Views. If you have 1000 visitors but you only have 1000 page views, then your strategy of getting visitors to your site is working but once they are at the site, they aren’t staying to look at more than one page. These visitors simply look at one page of your site (often your home page) and then leave and never come back.

However, if you have 1000 visitors, but your number of page views is 5000, that means that they came to your site and they read more than one page. That’s a great start. But you need more than just visitors coming and reading a lot once, it’s best to have them return again and again.

That’s what’s called the Repeat Visitor. This is the true measure of how attractive your content is. When you minus the number of individual unique visitors from the total number of visits, you get the true picture of how popular your website is with your visitors.

The Repeat Visitor Stats rather than Hits is the very best way to demonstrate how successful your website marketing strategy is through Web Statistics. Understanding how your unique visitors, page views and repeat visitor stats works can help you create, develop and amend your online marketing campaign in response to the visitors your site is receiving and not the number of hits you are getting. Understanding your visitor’s viewing behaviour can also tell you how to direct your marketing activity and which parts of your site need changing or improving.

A big part of SEO is tracking and understanding the results – hopefully the above will help you understand your webstats.

© Nikki Pilkington Please do not reproduce without either a link or permission

For more articles, click here.