Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics
I've just seen an advert for an estate agent in a local newspaper and in a large, bright panel in the middle of the page are the words - Our website receives 462,000 hits per day.
I can't decide whether to complain about the advert or not. They could well receive so many hits, but how many visits do they receive. Because Hits and Visits are two very different statistics which many people confuse.
While working for the local council, I was involved with a project in which four councils joined together to produce a property website to promote the area. It cost a considerable sum of money, as did the launch party. I had the pleasure (or pressure) of accompanying an executive director of the council and talking him through the project and the benefits in the eyes of central government of the project in that we were working with other councils. Two hours later, the only request was that I keep him informed of how many hits the site got. Ten minutes later I realised I was wasting my time explaining the difference between hits and visits. The consolation is that there are always more hits than visits so the figures always look better than they really are.
SO WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE ?
A visit is exactly that, you are reading this page so you have generated one visit for this page. A hit is an item from a web page which is viewed by a web browser. An item being a piece of text, an image, a link, and so on. This page is very simple in that it only has the heading image, plus one link. Therefore this page generates 2 hits.
If I go back to the estate agent, having had a look at their site I find that they have 140 branches across the country. Their home page consists of 3 frames so that's 3 hits to start with. The banner frame is made up of 5 images with 4 links - another 9 hits. The navigation bar has 12 buttons, plus rollover images for each button and links to other pages which gives us another 36 hits. The main frame has embedded flash which is not looped so 1 hit, 2 links, text and an image giving 5 hits for the frame. A total number of hits for that one page of 53 hits. Progressing that along to say that the 140 branches have maybe an average of 6 computers each and if they are sensible they will all show the home page. Which gives us 840 computers with 53 hits on the homepage, a total of 44,520 hits just when all their staff turn on their computers. If they get details off the site for customers there will be more hits on the search and search results page and another 53 each time they return. Personally I'm not convinced that many independant surfers visit their site.
Not all host servers provide all possible kinds of statistics, but here are a few which can be useful:
- The path taken to the site - direct to the site or via a link from another site.
- The pages visited
- The entry pages - usually the index page but some may link deeper into the site.
- The exit pages - hopefully not the index page as that may mean that the rest of the site has been ignored.
- The number of hits.
- The number of visits.
- Time and date of usage shown monthly.
- Type of visitor - Internet Explorer 6, 5 or robots from search engines.
- There are more but these are the main ones.