Strange title, right? Well those of us in the web world know what I’m talking about – web traffic.
The word “hits” is often used, and mis-used, when describing website traffic. If you have a stats program integrated with your website like Google Analytics, take a look at your numbers, specifically those under the “Visitors” tab. Though Analytics doesn’t show how many “hits” a website gets, they do show “visits”, which is similar to hits in that it incorporates both human and non-human traffic. Before you get weirded out by what you think has transformed into a blog post on the sci-fi subject, let me explain. Human web traffic is described as traffic funneled to a website through a possible variety of sources (search engines, referring sites, direct URL typing, etc.) denoted by a particular IP address (think of the IP address as the human visitor’s name, in a way). Non-human traffic is defined as bots or spiders (like search engines going through your site looking for content on how to index your site properly). Believe me when I say this happens more often than you think – your site could be visited by dozens of different bots and spiders on a daily basis alone.
In addition, a “hit” or a “visit” is not a good measure of the amount of different people visiting your site. Each time you visit your site (which you most likely do every day), that is counted as a hit or a visit. If you have a few people working for you, each of which work through your website, every separate time they see your site they register as a visit. Now you can see why depending on hits or visits as a method of tracking web traffic is faulty.
Alternatively, I recommend measuring “unique visitors” or “absolute unique visitors”. Over a selected time period, say the past month, each human visitor will only register as one absolute unique visitor no matter how many times they visit the site. If I were to query your site 100 times today and 100 times tomorrow and you ran a stats compilation over traffic during the course of this month, I would only register as one visitor. This drastically helps out businesses whose employees are consistently viewing the company website. It helps give these people better insight into true visitor behavior as well as trends.
For an advanced look into statistics, you can also filter out internal traffic from certain sources so they don’t count as visitors at all – making this extra helpful for compiling a statistic like “average time on site” – something we’ll look at next time.
