The Definition of Web Page Hits
The standard definition of a website hit is a visit at least one second in duration by a unique user (determined by IP address) to any page on the site. Even though the user many visit multiple times in a day he is counted only once for every 24-hour period.
Other People Are Reading
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Absolute Unique Visitors
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Absolute unique visitors are the kind of hits described in the introduction. This is a measure of unique visitors who want to view the page (as opposed to someone who finds it by accident and leaves immediately). The user is not counted every time she logs on to the site in one day. Absolute unique visitors are the kinds of visitors that most Internet advertising networks are most interested in seeing.
Visits and Page Views
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Visits are a more inclusive measurement. They include repeat visitors, accidental visitors (who "bounce" from the site quickly) and sometimes traffic from bots as well. A bot is a computer-generated visitor usually sent by search engines to navigate the page for content. When compared to absolute unique hits this type of hit shows a webmaster what percentage of visitors are returning. Page views are simply the number of pages a user viewed when she visited a website.
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Dummy Hits or Bots
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Sometimes fake hits (meaning hits not generated by humans) can completely distort the visitor metric data associated with a website. Bots or programs can send large amounts of fake traffic to a website and completely make a mess of its performance data. People may want to do this because on the surface it will make the web page look more popular (for public counters); or they may want to send fake hits to a competitor's site because this can drive down search engine rankings.
Bounce Rate
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The bounce rate is an important metric for measuring traffic, as it deals primarily with the quality of the traffic and how engaged visitors are with the content on the website. The bounce rate may be defined by how long a visitor stays on the site: for example, some sites may have a low bounce rate because they count as a hit any visit lasting at least one second, whereas other sites may have a higher bounce rate because they count only visitors who stay for longer than five seconds.
Additional Metrics
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Additional metrics for classifying visitors may be used depending on the nature of the information desired. For example, a site may define a hit as a visit that comes from a certain geographical area, or it may exclude hits from a certain region altogether. Internet advertising networks commonly have their own definitions of what constitutes a hit and will impose this definition on their publishers to ensure that they pay only for quality exposure.
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References
- Photo Credit www and internet image by mbs from Fotolia.com
