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The truth and lies of web site statistics

It seems every site owner and their dog loves to brag about how many “hits” their site receives. You hear it a lot on television - “ABC web site had 1 billion hits last year” - and that leads you to think they’re popular and their site is hugely successful. The truth can be somewhat different.

What exactly is a “hit”

Every web page you look at can made up of a number of different components, including any or all of the following…

• The HTML page - the bit that holds all the information you look at
• The images you see on the page
• One or more CSS files containing page styling information
• One or more javascript files
• Multimedia files such as Flash, Audio or Video

Every one of these components is registered as a “hit” - this page alone has probably racked up between 15-20 “hits” just by you viewing it, the next person will add another 15-20 to my total.

So now you can see what a “hit” actually means.

A more accurate measurement

If you look at the server logs for your site you should see totals for Unique visitors, Number of visits, and Page views - these might be called slightly different names depending what stats package you use but the information they contain is essentially the same.

So let me explain what each of the terms means…

• Unique visitors - this broadly reflects the number of individuals that have visited
• Number of visits - this counts how many times the individuals have visited (they may have visited more than once)
• Page views - this indicates the total number of pages that have been viewed

These statistics give a more accurate picture of what’s happening on your site than the misleading “hits” numbers. As with stats of this kind they will probably never be 100% accurate but near enough to give you a good overview.

Next time you hear someone quoting their sites hits you now know they’re spouting a load of old rubbish!