Hits vs. Pages vs. People
How good and successful is your website? Many website owners will gloat and claim:
I have 300,000 hits per month
to make sure that their numbers are high. There is big confusion between:
- Hits
- Pages
- People
Hits
A hit happens whenever a web browser, Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, Opera... issues a "GET". The web browser may issue dozens of GETs per page, including one for each graphic, for each photo, for each "container"... So hits will always be the highest number. When somebody gloats, including the media, about the huge number of hits, do NOT trust them. It's snow job. If they are misrepresenting their website this way, what about the rest?
Pages
A page is what you think, a web page. So it must be true and reliable. Yes? No! When is a web page a web page and is not a web page? It depends on who asks for the web page. "Served 250,000 web pages this month". Yes it's true but was it done by humans or by robots whose job is to steal your content, harvest emails, names and photos. Robots will go through every page every time. Or even worth through hot linking1.
People
People must be real, with eyes, brains... Shouldn't that be the correct number? Almost, it's the better one. You can get this information from Google Analytics or from some software such as AwStats. Google Analytics does not include anybody behind a "proxy server2".
Nobody can give you an accurate number of people that came to a website. Everybody tries to differentiate between robots and people, but it's very difficult. Robots change regularly their behaviour to stay anonymous.