A lot of misinformation is out there about traffic to a website. This is probably compounded by the number of different words associated with counting actions that compose web traffic. Website statistics say a lot about your web activity, popularity, and success, but if you can’t read the numbers properly, you might find yourself greatly mislead. Take for example the difference between 'hits" and "impressions". A simple micro-deep dive should remove uncertainty and ambiguity.
Hits
Often, people think that the term “hits” refers to the number of individuals that are visiting a website. This is NOT true. “Hits” actually refers to the number of files that a website has to request. And, a file can be anything from an image to a video on a page. So, if you have an HTML page that contains 3 images and a video, all of these files will be requested from the server upon page load. That means the "hit counter" will add 5 hits for the one visit = 1 HTML file, 3 images, and 1 video.
Technically, hit counters measure requests sent by a visitor’s browser to a server. Each time a visitor’s browser requests to see a page on your site, this request is relayed through your server and is called a hit.
Hits statistics are a great resource for webmasters when analyzing attributes such as server load, page load errors, and website speed. But does not give the exact number of clicks to your website.
Visits
A visit refers to a visitor’s session with your website. During the session, the user can view any number of pages, but the visit as a whole will count as one. The session ends when the visitor navigates to a new website, closes the browser, or is inactive for a certain period of time (i.e. 30 minutes). If the visitor returns to the website later in the day, this will count as the second visit.
Unique Visitor
Unique visitors refer to the number of unique individuals that visit a website within a specific timeframe. The time period set can vary depending on the tracking system in use, but it can be a week or month, for example. There are usually two ways to track unique visitors, and this may be through a tracking cookie or by unique IP addresses. So, if your tracking method uses a month-long tracking cookie, one web user can visit the website as many times as they want during that time and only have it counted as one visit.
The unique visitor tracking method is good because it shows a business website how many potential customers have browsed the site. This number is much more beneficial to a business, as opposed to hits.
Unique visitors can help a webmaster understand the number of times visitors repeatedly enter a website.
Impressions
A page impression is literally the number of times a page is loaded during a search query. Impressions are the number of times your ad pops up before a potential customer, If your ad captures the user's interest and they click on your ad ... that is a visitor to your ad/website.
Keep in mind once the visitor clicks to open your ad/website the HIT process starts to fetch files from the server.
Page impressions can also tell you how to better target content for web visitors. Let’s say you have a blog article that gets hundreds more page impressions per day than others. Apparently, that information was more intriguing and interesting to your web visitors than others, thus giving you a better idea of what future content is better suited for that audience.
Page Impressions / Page Views = tracking page impressions can tell a webmaster which pages have interesting content, as well as indicate the overall site popularity.
The difference between 'hits" and "impressions":
Hits measure the files that are requested from the server upon page loading. Hits are not an accurate way to measure website traffic.
On the other hand, page impression is the number of times a page is loaded. Where the user submits their query, the server responds, and the back-and-forth happens to load all of the elements in different hits. All of that, together, once the page loads, is called one pageview/impression.
The moral of the story here is that the term “hits” doesn’t mean much for website traffic tracking. If you want to get a true idea of how your site is operating, you will need to look at:
visits,
unique visitors,
page impressions,
and bounce rates.
All of these can be tracked using Google Analytics, which is free and easy to install. Don’t spend any more time being misinformed about your website’s activity, especially when it’s this simple to get the full picture.
Now that the mystery of measuring different aspects of website intricacies for traffic stats was addressed it is actually necessary to have traffic. So how to harness solving for more traffic? It's a multi-pronged approach, which is offered with these tips for generating more traffic to a website.
Be Safe.
