All About Hit Counters

Why do you not see a 'hit counter' on www.pinehillscommunity.com? Other sites have them, some show only a few 'hits' while others have a great deal of 'hits'. So who really cares about 'hits' anyway?

Website operators for one, advertisers on websites are another as they pay for high traffic web sites to place their ads on these websites. For websites operators, being a 'high-traffic' website enables them to charge advertisers more. Hit counters can be very mis-leading to those that view them on a website and especially mis-leading to advertisers due the ease with which the hit counters can be tricked into showing high numbers.

How does one 'trick' a hit counter? One of the easiest ways is to program it to start the counter at a higher number (you didn't really think everyone starts at zero do you?). Another is to refresh the page, pressing F5 to reload (refresh) it; if you refresh the page you are currently reading you will add about 17 or 18 'hits' to the logs.

Below are some articles from leading websites explaining hits, views and visitors. They will teach you the real mark of a sucessful website (unique visitors) as well as describing what the others are all about.

Hit Counter
A hit counter measures and displays the number of times visitors have viewed a single page on a website. Hit counters are typically displayed on homepages. Hit counters can be public or non-public. If they are non-public, or ‘invisible’, only the webmaster can see how many times the page has been viewed. 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. There is a high potential for confusion here, because log analysis also involves the interpretation of ‘hits’. The hits recorded by log files are much more numerous, and do not individually represent individual human ‘hits’ or ‘clicks’. The hits recorded by log files each represent a single pieces of information (for example a graphic such as a gif) which, when taken together, make up page views. In log file analysis a single page view can generate dozens of hits, depending on how much information is being called up, in terms of graphics, etc. Therefore it is important to always find out the definition of a hit in the system that you are using.

The advantage of hit counters is that many are free, easy to install, and can be graphically altered to fit in with the feel of your site. Additionally, there are also numerous scripts available for free download that can be used to make your own hit or page counter, if you have the time and know-how. To have a look, type “hit counter script download” into your favorite search engine.

The drawback of hit counters is that they will not tell you how many unique visitors you have had. Nor do they always tell you the time period which has been measured. Often the data stretches back to the installation of the counter, which can be interesting, but will not help to analyze trends.

Page Counter
Essentially, a page counter is the same thing as a hit counter: a line of code and a graphic device used to display the number of visitors who have viewed a page on your site. A page counter only measures and presents statistics for the page it is installed on. Technically, a hit counter is a page counter, as it measures and presents the same information, the only difference being in name. Page counters often provide a service that measures page views on multiple pages of a website, as opposed to hit counters, which are typically used to count hits on a single page.

Web Counter
Much like a hit counter or a page counter, a web counter is a combination of code and graphic device that allows you to measure and display the number of visitors a web site has received. Web counters are typically used to measure multiple pages. A web counter is a step closer towards visitor tracking, as some web counters offer additional statistics, such as both the number of visitors, and the number of pages viewed, so that, for example, 200 visitors will have looked at 345 pages over a given period. Additionally, web counters offer analysis, for example, by providing a comparative overview to show which pages receive the most visitors.

Understanding Hits, Page Views and User Sessions
When analyzing web site traffic, there are a number of measures that are used to report on activity and volume of visitors. Because of this, there is often confusion as to what the various measures actually mean, and how they are calculated. This document explains the key methods for measuring traffic to a web site, what the differences are, and the associated statistics that appear in WebTrends reports. When reading this document, it is important to have a high level understanding of how web sites deliver information to a browser. When a user clicks on a link, or types in a URL in the address line in their browser, they are actually sending a request to a server to send specific information, contained on a page. Part of this request is the IP address (or return address) of the user's computer, so the server knows where to send the page. The page may contain various elements, or files, such as HTML text, graphic images, such as .gif, .jpg, .bmp, audio or video files, etc. As the server responds to this request, it writes a summary of the action into a log file. WebTrends products read these log files, and analyze, summarize and report on the contents in an easy to understand manner.

Methods for Measuring Web Site Activity

The three most common measurements of web site activity are hits, page views and user sessions. Following is a description of each.

Total Hits is the total number of files that are requested from the server. This includes all graphics, audio/video files, and other supporting files, as well as the actual html page itself. Total Hits includes all requests in the count whether or not the files were successfully retrieved. Total Successful Hits, on the other hand, are only those files that were successfully served.

Page Views, or Page Impressions is the number of pages viewed. Pages are files with extensions such as .htm, .html, .asp (and a few others). (With WebTrends, you can see (and edit) the full list by clicking Options |Web Log Analysis | File Types, and then Document File Extensions.) Impressions, therefore, are a count of the number of pages viewed and do not include the supporting graphic files. Thus, by definition, you should have more total hits than page views. For instance, if a site has 1 web page with 5 graphics on it, every time a user visited that page, it would be reported that 6 hits and 1 page view or impression occurred.

User Sessions is the number of unique users who visited a web site during a certain time period. Measuring user sessions is more complicated than measuring hits or page views. The user session statistic can be seen as equivalent to "Unique Visits," which, unless every visitor only sees one page, will be less than the number of page views/impressions.

Hits, Unique Visitors and Page Views - Studying Web Traffic. When studying your web site traffic, it is important to be able to differentiate the above terms. A question that webmasters are often asked is "how many hits does your site get?".

You then need to ask "do you mean hits, unique visitors or page views?". Many hit counters, such as the FrontPage 2000 component can be a little misleading. This particular hit counter only measures page views and if you sit on a page clicking the "refresh" button, it will increment. In order to get an accurate picture of your web site traffic flow; you'll probably want a more detailed reporting tool than this.

A hit is the result of a file being requested and served from your web site. This can be a html document, an image file, an audio track etc. etc. Web pages that contain a large number of elements will return high hit scores. Hits are of very little consequence when analysing your visitor demographics.

A page view means just that. Once again, it is not a true indication of how many different people are visiting your web site, but it is a good way to judge how "sticky" (the ability to retain the interest of visitors) your web site is and is an important consideration regarding the possibility of attracting high paying advertising.

A unique visitor is where stats really count. It is someone with a unique IP address (when you log onto the Internet, you are assigned a unique IP address, or if you are a cable modem user your IP address is usually "static", it never changes) who is entering a Web site for the first time that day (or some other specified period). Your IP address is an identifier, while you are using it, no else on the Internet can utilise that particular set of numbers. Your number is counted once, usually for a 2-24 hour period, dependent up the tracking software. So no matter how many times a visitor refreshes or navigates through your web site, they will only be counted once for the specified time period. This is by far the more accurate way of analysing web site performance.

When you divide the number of visitors by the number of page views, this can give an excellent indication of whether traffic is transient or is staying on your site. If the average is one page or under, you can be pretty sure that there is something on your pages that is scaring people off. Perhaps the load time is too slow or your opening statement is inappropriate. Remember that due to bandwidth considerations, those first few elements that display as your page is loading may be the deciding factor as to whether a visitor waits around for the entire page to load.

Studying your web site traffic can take up a fair amount of time, but it is definitely worth it. Of course in amongst all this you need to be able to make the time to carry out promotion, maintain linkages, develop new content etc etc etc. Running a large, content rich site is definitely not a part-time job.

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