First, let’s take a hypothetical tour of the process of measuring website traffic. Imagine Hypothetical Jim visiting the home page of a new website he learned about on Google.com. Hypothetical Jim visits the home page, then visits the “About Us” page, which he bookmarks. Later, Hypothetical Stu visits the home page, then leaves the site. Later that evening, Hypothetical Jim returns to the “About Us” page using his bookmark, and clicks on the link to the “Contact Us” page. After looking over the page, he leaves the site. From the text description above, you can determine that: (1) the site has had 2 unique visitors, Hypothetical Jim and Hypothetical Stu; (2) the site has had three unique visitor sessions (two for Jim and one for Stu); and (3) the site has had 5 pageviews (4 by Jim and 1 by Stu). You may wonder wether to count Hypothetical Jim’s second visit to the “About Us” page as a second pageview. Count it. What you cannot determine from the description above is the number of website hits. A hit is measured every time a specific unique file (HTML files, image files, script files, frames, etc.) is downloaded. In other words, many people refer to the total number of HTTP Requests a user makes as the number of hits the site receives. Since a single web page can be made up of any number of unique files (hundreds even), measuring hits is often meaningless in measuring the success of a website. In this hypothetical example, the homepage consists of 24 files, so web analysis software will count 24 hits every time a visitor downloads the home page. There are 21 total images, 1 script, and one CSS file (plus the index html file itself). The “About Us” page consists of 14 files, so web analysis software will count 14 hits. There are 11 images, 1 script, and one CSS file (plus the about html file itself). The same goes for the “Contact Us” page. As you can see, website hits do not consistently correlate with unique visitors, sessions, or pageviews. The only reason to look at hits is to measure the number of HTTP requests that a browser has to make in order to view your page. Generally speaking, the larger the hit count, the slower the download. For that reason, it is best to reduce the number of hits/page until the download speed is optimized. Savvy media buyers ignore webmasters who claim to have thousands of hits. They measure pageviews, user sessions, and unique and return visitors. Please Note: Netultimate.com does optimization, link building and any thing to do with Organic search engine optimization. We do Web solutions and Software development and also Search Engine Optimization for a very affordable price because of our offshore capabilities. Visit us www.netultimate.com and for assistance right away and contact us via live attended in the site or by phone at (703) 849 1269 (USA)/(416) 238 0270 (CANADA)/(866) 548 4613(TOLL FREE) or by email at service@netultimate.com
