Why Advertisers Don't Care About Your Hits

'Hits' are the most misunderstood metric when it comes to discussing website traffic. Below I'll explain exactly what they are and how you can use the correct understanding of this term to avoid paying too much for online advertising.

I'll keep this light and over-simplified to avoid introducing too much analytics terminology.

What is a 'Hit'?

First let me make this very clear - a 'Hit' is not a 'Visit' or a 'Visitor'.

A Hit is a request to any file needed to display a webpage.

For example:

Say your website has one page with one picture on it plus your logo image at the top. When a person looks at this page your statistics software will log 3 Hits, one hit for each file needed to display the page. The page itself is a file, the logo image is a file and the other image is a file - 3 files have been Hit you could say.

Now imagine a page with 40 images on it. That's 41 Hits (including the page itself) that will log in your stats every time someone looks at that page! If they reload the page, the Hits count again logs all of those file requests.

Can you see how quickly the Hits count can grow?

Hits are a useless statistic

Now that you know what a Hit is you can begin to understand why advertisers don't find them useful at all.

What advertisers do care about on the other hand are 'Visits' and 'Unique Visits'.

When a person comes to your website, this is called a 'Visit'. If they come back tomorrow, that's another visit and so-on. So if I visit your website 10 times this month I will be represented in your stats as 10 Visits.

I will only represent 1 'Unique Visit' though as I am only 1 person. This is why your Visits count is almost always going to be greater than your Unique Visits count - some people will return to your website.

Why terms 'Hits' & 'Visits' lead to confusion

The problem stems from use of the words Hits and Visits as though they mean the same thing. When most people talk about how many visitors their website attracts each month they often say something like "I get 20,000 hits per month". But do they really know what they are saying?

If you are talking about how many Visitors you get each month say "I get 20,000 visitors each month". But make sure you are getting this number from your website statistics where it says 'Visits'.

Don't even bother mentioning your Hits count as it is irrelevant and comes across as very amateurish.

Buying Online Advertising

If you are considering advertising on a website then you should take a look at the article Statistics To Ask For Before Buying Website Advertising. And now you know the difference between Hits and Visits you will be able to determine if the price they charge is worth the number of Visits your ads will be exposed to.