Well, in all honestly, why don't ban "visits" and "visitors" and "page impressions" aswell? Whatever generic name we use for the concept of "hits" is of little importance. What is of importance however is that there needs to be made clear to more clients/users of the analytic tools that "hits/visits etc" measure the sucess of the marketing of the website/s, n o t the website effectiviness. Hence it can't be used as a sucess indicator for a website. I often come across clients that tries to claim sucess for their websites buy referring to the number of people that finds the site, aka visits/visitors. When asked what that tells them about the business outcome of the website they go blank.
/Stefan

Thanks Jim, that sounds like a good initiative. I checked the WAA-site out and it seems like something that should be done over here in Europe too. The International commitee might be interesting for a lot of us over here though, have you done anything to market WAA outside the states yet (besides the UK/Ireland..)?
/S

Oh, so agree!!

Especially because there is a new meaning of hits among the general public (and journalists): it now denotes 'visits' (or 'arrivals', if we want to be more technical) - the number of people who 'hit' the page or site. So, the confusion rages on... Maybe a collective letter to all media, hosted by E-consultancy and signed by all members/industry professionals?

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