What is a "hit", "unique" or "page view"

Beware "hits" - make sure that the smooth talking salesman does not try to "con" you

Make sure that you understand the following three terms that are used, almost interchangeably, to talk about the numbers of people visiting your web site.If you do not understand them, a smooth tongued salesman will try to con you, with talk of large numbers of "hits"

• "Unique" or "visit" - this is what you really want to know. It means one individual visitor, who arrives at your web site and proceeds to browse

• "page views" or "impressions" - once a "unique" gets to your site they will look at 1 or 2 or 3 or more pages. On average they will look at at about 2.5 pages. In geek speak, each page a visitor looks at is called a "page view" or "impression". Basically the more pages each unique visitor looks at, the more chance you have of making a sale.

• "hits" - the real Black Sheep in the family. The average web site owner thinks that it means visitors, but it does not. In geek speak it refers to the "number of files downloaded". Important to a geek but not to you or me. If you imagine the average web page, it has photos (each photo is a file and hence a hit) and lots of buttons (each button is a file and hence a hit). The average page ahs about 15 of these, essentially programming, files.

So one visit to an average hotel web site will generate 3 page views and 45 hits

or      1 visit = 3 page views = 45 hits

So when I say the average hotel site generates only 5 visits per day, pity the web site owner who puffs out his chest and tells me proudly it must be exceptional as it is getting 200 hits per day. 200 hits means around 5 unique visits and very infrequent bookings (it takes around 100 web site visitors to get 1 hotel booking)

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