In this article we would like to share our view on website hits and where they fit into your web metrics, search engne opttimisation and your business and your website.
Hits is a very common metric for websites; probably the best known and most used statistic for websites. Basically, hits is a count of the number of requests to your webserver. Each time a page is requested a new hit is generated.
It is very different to measuring how many people have visited your website, how many pages are viewed or how popular your website.
Hits are very commonly abused as a statistic, by search engine optimization (SEO) companies and by staff inside businesses. Sometimes innocently, but often we see businesses being lead astray intentionally.
For example, we have seen a internal IT manager hit a performance bonus by setting the home page of every pc in the office to be the company website. Resulting in a cash bonus because of an increase in hits.
A client we worked with had been “conned” by a SEO company. They charged a large amount of money and “optimized” their website. What the SEO company actually did was run a programme on one of their servers that visited our clients website regularly, increasing the website hits.
Hits are useful, they provide a very corse measurement of traffic to your website. It can show some important elements like small numbers of visitors revisiting pages over and over. But on the whole, there are better metrics for a business to track.
So if hits are not good how do we know the site is working?
This is our view; decide what the objective of your website is, then measue that. So if your website is there to attract new clients, measure (via hard metrics) how many new clients come via the website. If you sell via your website, measure sales NOT the hits.
Many websites are about influencing an audience and having impact in your community/industry.
We have an experience working in sport, where influencing/informing people in the sport is often what matters.
A real life recent example we had, was a conversation we had with a communication manager. They questioned if blogs were worth it, asking specifically about the hits of blogs in their sport.
Our response was/is that it is not about the hits rather the impact. A website/blog has an audience and it can be large or small. But, if that small audience includes the important people to your business it is much more valueable than a huge audience (lots of hits) of people that don’t matter to your business.
If all your hits are from North America; but you only trade in the UK your website is not working. If you have a small hit rate, but the are all from the city you do all your trade in; the site may be more valuable than lots of hits from China.
Summary:
Hits are not a great measure of website success, they are a very rough measure of traffic. Success should be based on your business goals, not raw hit figures.
The impact on your target audience/market is more important than hits. One hit by the right person is worth a million hits from the wrong people.
enVirtua is looking to work with businesses who want to develop their business via websites. We would like to work with you to define your success criteria, build/rebuild your website and refine ovetime to achieve your business goals.
Please contact us by phone or email to start a conversation about what your business wants to achieve.
