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Here are a couple of |
Your web
site; will it be a "hit" or an also ran? And how do you tell the difference? Hits, page views, visits, unique visits, downloads….what’s in a name? Confused? Let us try to clarify things for you. In the Internet world you may often hear of people saying that their web site gets a lot of “hits” over a period of time. Often they tell you this when they are trying to persuade you to be featured on their web domain in some form or another. Usually the number of “hits” per day or per month or whatever seems very high. And what’s more, the huge number may even be accurate. But dear reader the number of “hits” really is in no way indicative of the popularity of any website. To get an idea of what hits really are lets look at your website as a shop window. Lets say that your shop window has a lot of items on display. Items that you want people to look at, and hopefully to buy. But instead of clothing, furniture or jewelry in your shop window you have selected items to make your business look better. For the sake of this exercise lets assume that you have your logo at the top of the window. Then lets add a photo of your business, a couple of graphics for different parts of your shop that you want viewers to visit, and one or two more for various purposes. Perhaps you have 8 items in the form of graphics or photos to decorate your shop window home page. Hey, perhaps you have even added some video footage or flash animation. Ok you’re looking good. Now here’s what happens. Someone, somewhere, wants to see what you’ve got in your window. You’ve got a nibble! What they do is put your address in the URL space at the top of your page. Pretend its WWW.yourshop.com. So the browser finds your server and requests to see what you’ve got in the shop. Done. Your server opens the curtains and begins to display your window. At the same time, software that is built into every server begins to record what it is serving up. And, dear heart, it counts everything. All the logos, all the photos, all the graphics, the page, the audio, video, everything. So maybe the counter thing racks up 15 items; or 5 or 8, whatever. These are the “hits” these are what the slick salesperson wants you to think are people. This is selling air. These 15 hits are, in fact, one person. One unique visit or if you prefer, one session. Got it? So when someone sales you should spend your hard earned money on his/her web site because of the amount of “hits” the site earns, perhaps you should “hit” back. Explicit directions to the door should do the trick. Page views are a more accurate method of measuring the popularity of a web page. They tell you how many pages a visitor has looked at whilst visiting your site. It is also easier to understand. Web Trends is a leading company that makes the software that counts the activity on a given page, and they put it straight and simple. Here’s what they said; “page views, or page impressions is the number of pages viewed. Pages are files with extensions such as .htm, .html, .asp (and a few others). Impressions, therefore, are a count of the number of pages viewed and do not include the supporting graphic files. Thus, by definition, you should have more total hits than page views. For instance, if a site has 1 web page with 5 graphics on it, every time a user visited that page, it would be reported that 6 hits and 1 page view or impression occurred”. It follows then that reading the number of page views can tell you that your visitor had a little look see around your site and that they may have found it interesting. Great. But it does not tell you how many visitors, or people came to see what you have on offer. Unique visits, user sessions or, if you prefer, people, is really the bottom line here. This is the count of the number of people or unique users that visited a web site-your shop window remember-during a selected time period. Measuring user sessions is more complicated than measuring hits or page views. These unique visits will show a much lower score, or count, than either hits or page views. But for my money they are the money players. And here’s some good news. When a site registers, say, 100 visits or people, it is a fair bet that the actual count is really a bit higher. How often have you seen more than one person looking at a web site on one computer monitor? This is where the action is, your trick is to get the people looking at a lot of pages. You really want you page view count to be much higher than your unique visitor or people count. Now there is the true measurement of the worth of your web site. email comments for possible publication at bf@activelifestyle.com |