Let’s start with “hits”. This is possibly the most misunderstood word that website owners freely throw around. You’ve probably heard the following dozens of times. “My website got over half a million hits last month”. “My site got over a million hits per month!” So while your competitor or best friend is trying to brag about how many “hits” his website is getting, what does this word really mean and why should you snicker after hearing this?

To answer this question, let’s use Wikipedia’s definition to define what a “hit” is:

Hit – A request for a file from the web server. Available only in log analysis.

What does this really mean?

When you visit any page in a website, the page you land on counts as one hit. In fact, every page you click on and go to counts as a “hit”. However, web pages are made up of several elements including graphics and most web pages have several graphics on them. When you land on a page, not only is your visit to this page considered a hit, but each image that loads on that page is also considered a “hit”.

Let’s say that you actually had 1,000 individuals visit your website last month. This would translate to 1,000 hits plus many more hits. Each page, that each person visits, adds additional hits to this number. And each image and other pieces of content that loads on each page further inflates the number of hits.

So when someone says that they received one million hits to their website, this could potentially mean that they only received 1,000-10,000 individual visitors to their website (not one million individual visitors to their website).

Unique visitors, on the other hand, means individual visitors to your website. If I visit a website 5 times within a month, then I will be counted as one unique visitor who has visited the website once within a month.

So if someone says that they are receiving one million unique visitors per month, then they are receiving quite a lot of visitors.

Some people view “hits” statistics as “misleading” and not important when analyzing traffic to a website. I personally disagree with this. There is a direct correlation between the number of hits and what people are doing within your site. An increase in the number of hits can mean that people are spending more time within your website. Getting people to spend more time within your website is an excellent achievement and something we all strive for.