Are You Still Hung Up On Web Hits?

This blog post from the Microsoft adCenter blog says it best – web hits are nonsense when it comes to measuring web traffic.

Some website owners are still hung up on the big numbers that web hits convey, but in reality a hit is simply the number of images, files, and component items that a single page contains and not a measure of a real person visiting your website. One page can create hundreds of hits in your statistical results if it contains a lot of graphics as the browser downloads the components.

A much better measure of real success is to measure not page views, but unique visitors. Google Analytics and Urchin Web Site Statistics provide these important statistics. By measuring the number of unique visitors you can get a real view of how popular your website really is. Sure the number will be way less than hits but it will be an accurate measurement. On top of that measuring unique visitors is a web standard and one that professional webmasters talk about, dissect, and try to improve.

So don’t think that by saying you got 1 million hits on your website that it means anything, it simply shows unfortunately, your own ignorance of what is really important when it comes to measuring success on the Web.