The Great Internet Traffic Bamboozle

Hits vs. Hosts

If you're familiar with the Internet, you've heard lots of talk about how many "hits" such-and-such site receives per day, or how many total "hits" a page has received. These numbers are usually huge, and are meant to demonstrate that a site is extremely popular. While half a million hits per day is certainly a lot (only the most popular sites on the Internet receive this many), it does not mean that 500,000 people visit this site every day. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

Counting hits is a misleading way of judging a site's popularity, but it has nevertheless become the standard. At Open Market we're not afraid of deviating from the standard in the name of truthfulness and accuracy. There are several ways of measuring the traffic through a site but many commercial sites and ISPs have not gone to the effort to determine actual traffic for their clients. To be perfectly frank, it does not serve their purposes. As long as there is confusion about what a hit is, most sites can continue to imply that they are receiving more traffic than they really are.

What is a hit?

Every access to any HTML file or image on the site counts as a hit. That means that if you go to a page which has a logo, three images, and a smaller image at the bottom, that's six hits. When you click on one of the hotlinks, you might rack up seven or eight hits on the next page. By the time you're done browsing the site, you might be responsible for a hundred hits. The more images on a page, no matter how small, the more hits.

What are accesses?

An access is an individual visit to a page. Each person who visits ShopSite generally visits several pages. Accesses will always be higher than unique hosts. Unlike hits, though, recording accesses is very important. That is how we know how long each person browsed for and where they went. That is how we know which aisles in our stores are the most popular. Visitors to the ShopSite Marketplace visit 4-5 pages on average, which adds up to 25-30 hits each.

What is a visitor/unique host?

A unique host is an individual visitor to a particular site. Even if they return several times throughout the day, they will only be counted once. If the merchant has visited the store to look at changes made, they will only be counted once. It is possible that one person could visit ShopSite twice during the day dialing in through two separate machines and be counted twice, but that is not common, and therefore counting unique hosts is an extremely accurate measure of real traffic.

Why is it better to know how many unique hosts have visited your site rather than how many hits?

Hits provide only the roughest of estimates about how many people have visited your store. Not only will each image on each page count as a hit, but if the visitor reloads the page for any reason, that will count as a bunch more hits. Only by knowing the number of individuals that have visited your site can you make good decisions about your business.

How can you translate visitors into hits?

There's no easy formula, since it depends on how many images each page on a site has, but on average, 1000 visitors translates into roughly 30,000 hits. By this count, pages with 500,000 hits per month are being visited by about 16,600 people. That's a lot, but it's not half a million.

Back to Main Help Page | Search | Give Feedback
If you are not finding the help you need, please give detailed feedback.