Who is this Guide for?
If you are trying to market your website on other site on the World Wide Web or you are analysing your websites analytics to evaluate its return on investment; then this guide is especially written for you.
What is the big issue?
Over the years I have heard it said something to the effect of “my site receives millions hits a month”, “this site receives millions of hits”. The point I am trying to make here is that “hits” are totally ambiguous and have no value in assessing return on investment. Unique visits are what you should be looking at to determine whether you should advertise your website on a particular publisher’s site.
What is the difference between a “hit” and a “visit”?
A unique visit is a numerical count of the unique number of visitors to a website.
A hit is a numerical count of the file(s) requested from a webserver for any given webpage.
In English an example please?
If you visited a web page that had nothing but text in it, and
one person visited it;
that would equate to 1 visit and 1 hit.
This is because one person visited the page and you requested 1 file from the webserver the webpage itself.
If you visited the same webpage but this time it had 10 images in it, and
one person visited it
that would equate to 1 visit and 11 hits.
This is because one person visited the page and you requested 11 files from the server, 1 webpage and 11 images.
Why is this important?
Lets say I am a web publisher and you approach me to place an advert on my site. I may brag to you that I receive 10 million hit a month on my website. The figure 10 million sounds impressive, but as you have just been made aware the hits do not mean a thing.
There is nothing stopping me from having a huge number of images on my pages to show high number of hits.
I hope you can you this litter bit of knowledge to make the right choice in choosing the right website to advertise with.
Conclusion
Ask prospective website publishers how many visits they get a month. Better still how many unique visits do they get in a month!
