It's a strange thing this continuing use of "hits" as a metric for site traffic / success. Anyone who knows anything about web metrics knows it is nigh on useless, or meaningless, for most business / marketing purposes. 

Even given that we can't expect everyone to know about web metrics, the average "lay person", or journalist, still talks about "hits". If they said what would probably be much more intuitive to them ("visits" for example) they would actually be much more accurate. I suspect people are just trying to sound savvy when, in fact, the opposite is the result. 

Unfortunately, "hits" was bandied about so much in the dotcom days that it seems to have stuck. But it is time to kill it off. Rather than getting people confused about the differences between 'unique users', 'sessions' and the like, I propose we just stick to 'visits'. 

I wouldn't mind so much if the continued use of "hits" was confined to the non-expert world. However, in the recent Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards supplement to NMA it says in the introduction that "questions of metrics still need to be resolved...a trading currency needs to be established..." and then 3 of the 16 entries (almost 20%) cite "hits" as evidence of their success.

Personally I would send back any entry that talked about hits. Or, as NMA, I would sub-edit the content. It's not helping anyone. 

Rant over...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

Thats partly true Will ... but the term "hits" doesn't actually mean anything at all to anyone. For example say your webpage has 20 images on it then the number of hits will be 21 ( 1 hit for the actual page download and a further 20 hits for each of the graphics files) ... so in terms of web metrics it doesnt tell us anything about the visitor apart from the fact that he looked at a page. 

Returning and Unique visitors are far more useful metrics. Not that i'm a sceptic you understand Ashley, but I think the term 'hits' will be thrown around for many years to come.

Andrew Allfrey
e-Prominence

On 07:23:53 9 November 2005 partywill wrote:

Although a complete novice, i was always under the impression that hits don't lie and visits are subjective, dependent on  the analytics used.

Will B
partyoffers

On 10:51:33 8 November 2005 Ashley wrote:

It's a strange thing this continuing use of "hits" as a metric for site traffic / success. Anyone who knows anything about web metrics knows it is nigh on useless, or meaningless, for most business / marketing purposes. 

Even given that we can't expect everyone to know about web metrics, the average "lay person", or journalist, still talks about "hits". If they said what would probably be much more intuitive to them ("visits" for example) they would actually be much more accurate. I suspect people are just trying to sound savvy when, in fact, the opposite is the result. 

Unfortunately, "hits" was bandied about so much in the dotcom days that it seems to have stuck. But it is time to kill it off. Rather than getting people confused about the differences between 'unique users', 'sessions' and the like, I propose we just stick to 'visits'. 

I wouldn't mind so much if the continued use of "hits" was confined to the non-expert world. However, in the recent Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards supplement to NMA it says in the introduction that "questions of metrics still need to be resolved...a trading currency needs to be established..." and then 3 of the 16 entries (almost 20%) cite "hits" as evidence of their success.

Personally I would send back any entry that talked about hits. Or, as NMA, I would sub-edit the content. It's not helping anyone. 

Rant over...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com

09/10/2005
Andy Vining BluRoute

I have to concur entirely with the motivation behind this comment.

It’s confusing but forgivable when the “lay people” quote statistics that look tremendous but mean nothing…but it’s downright misleading and unprofessional when people who should know better quote these statistics as though they mean anything at all.

The use of such meaningless statistics is, in my view, self perpetuating as the new wave of professionals – who do not yet know better – appear to be “repeating the sins” of their elders.

It really is akin to the phrase “think of a number – any number at all” the bigger the better will look impressive. 

As President of the Web Analytics Association, it's my solemn duty to explain that HITS is an extremely valuable acronym. It helps us recognize the knowledge of the person we are speaking with. It lets us separate those we can trust from those who talk the talk, but can't quite walk and chew gum at the same time. It's an important reference tool when dealing with superiors, vendors, consultants and brothers-in-law.

And all we have to do is keep mum about the fact that it stands for:

                   How Idiots Track Success 

Here, here! I hear people say 'hits' all the time and they get very confused when you tell them that they're meaningless. The sooner we lose them from our vocabulary, the better.

On 10:51:33 8 November 2005 Ashley wrote:

It's a strange thing this continuing use of "hits" as a metric for site traffic / success. Anyone who knows anything about web metrics knows it is nigh on useless, or meaningless, for most business / marketing purposes. 

Even given that we can't expect everyone to know about web metrics, the average "lay person", or journalist, still talks about "hits". If they said what would probably be much more intuitive to them ("visits" for example) they would actually be much more accurate. I suspect people are just trying to sound savvy when, in fact, the opposite is the result. 

Unfortunately, "hits" was bandied about so much in the dotcom days that it seems to have stuck. But it is time to kill it off. Rather than getting people confused about the differences between 'unique users', 'sessions' and the like, I propose we just stick to 'visits'. 

I wouldn't mind so much if the continued use of "hits" was confined to the non-expert world. However, in the recent Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards supplement to NMA it says in the introduction that "questions of metrics still need to be resolved...a trading currency needs to be established..." and then 3 of the 16 entries (almost 20%) cite "hits" as evidence of their success.

Personally I would send back any entry that talked about hits. Or, as NMA, I would sub-edit the content. It's not helping anyone. 

Rant over...

Ashley Friedlein
CEO, E-consultancy.com