Hits

Hits are often confused with the number of website visitors, or with a site's popularity. This isn't true. Every graphic on a webpage registers as a Hit. So, complicated web pages with 30 small photos or graphics will be registering 30 hits per page view in the server log. Using a Hit counter as a web analytics tool will not prove very helpful. Hit counters are better at showing the complexity of a webpage than they are as web traffic counters. If someone wanted to really manipulate the ignorant, a website could easily be built to register thousands of hits an hour with just a few visitors.

The founding president of the Web Analytics Association Jim Sterne says it best: "HITS stands for How Idiots Track Success."

A Hit is defined as an individual file that is requested from a web server. This file is subsequently downloaded and displayed on a computer screen as the webpage you see. Each webpage may contain dozens of discrete files. So, a Hit is not the number of times a webpage is downloaded, but the number of times a webpage is viewed times however many individual files the webpage has. All those Hit counters you see on websites that claim they're tallying "site visitors" are not accurate. At best, they're just misrepresenting the truth. At worst, they're deliberately misleading people into thinking their website is more popular than it is, and assuming the general public is so ignorant they'll never realize it.

If you were to base a website's popularity by the number of Hits, this would be a gross exaggeration. A very simple webpage may just have 7 or 8 files on the homepage. But the more complicated the webpage, and the more graphic files per page, the more files must be downloaded to view it and subsequently a higher number of hits are recorded.