"Hits" mean nothing to me
If you measure your site's popularity in hits, you stand a good chance of me ignoring everything else you say. Hits are a measurement of how many file requests were made to your server. So, basically, it means nothing to me. I don't care how many times images were requested to be delivered to browsers. If your site's home page is image-heavy you could easily be getting dozens of hits every time someone loads that one page.
Now, I know that most of the time when a rep tells me how many hits they get they actually mean pageviews (a useful metric), but confusing web terminology makes me a little nervous about giving you my clients' money.
Tell me how many visitors you have, tell me how many visits you get, tell me how many pageviews you receive. More importantly, tell me all the information you have about who your audience is.
Don't tell me how many "hits" your site gets. That only tells me to be wary of signing a contract with you.
4 comments:
I'm usually more interested in the "what" when it comes to page hits. As in which pages are viewed the most and the best guess why that is the case.
Although its a bit more ambiguous, I also like to know about visit duration. Knowing that visitors are spending time (but not too much time) on a site can mean we are providing something of value, if other numbers are showing up (visits growth, uniques etc.).
(Although I know little about this from business perspective, I would assume good visits duration would mean you have more time to get your client's product's message to the consumer -- and that would be a good thing.)
You're absolutely right, duration is a very important stat, too. I guess the point overall is that there are some measures that are just entirely useless to me :)
Ha ha... HITS stands for "How Idiots Track Stats"...
Haha! Can't believe I hadn't heard that one before. Awesome.
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