"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.

Glossary: Hits

Hits are requests for files from a server. When you visit a web page, your browser has to request all the files that make up that page to be delivered to you. Hits do not measure how many times the site was visited, nor how many visitors the site has. They don't even measure how many individual pages were loaded. They only measure how many times the server received requests for files. If your site's home page has 100 images, and a single person visits that page one, you just got 100 hits. Congratulations.

Don't measure your site's traffic in hits, then. Because it's meaningless.