Hits and Visitors and Conversions, oh my!

A lot of people often mistake the term “hits” to mean the number of visitors a website receives. The number of “Hits” your website receives can sound pretty impressive and it is often the number used by marketers and SEO companies because it sounds bigger but “hits” are basically pretty useless in tracking how many people actually visit your website.

Every time a web browser requests any file from your server, a “hit” is recorded. Now, that would be all well and good except that a single web page is typically made up of many files such as text, images, scripts and other files. Each one of these files counts as a “hit” to load just one page for one visitor to see. Therefore, a single visit to your page could result in dozens of “hits” being recorded. Not only that, every time that same person revisits the page and has to reload the files, more “hits” get recorded. As you can see, dozens of “hits” can easily be recorded from just one single visitor. Pretty impressive sounding numbers but not very useful information.

“Visitors”, on the other hand, are recorded once for each visitor that views each page on your site no matter how many files are requested. When somebody actually becomes a new visitor depends on your tracking software. For example, Google Analytics considers all visits to the same page by the same person within a 30-minute session to count as only 1 visit. This would therefore be a much more accurate count of the number of actual visitors to your site.

Of course, visitors are one thing but unless you are simply just providing free information to the masses, actual customers are what you really want. Conversions are basically when your visitors submit lead information, make a purchase, view a specific page, complete a form, download a document or any other measurable action on your website. The percentage of visitors who actually do something measurable compared to the total number of visitors is your “Conversion Rate”.

So, the next time somebody brags about how many “hits” their website is getting, or an “expert” tells you how many “hits” he can get for you, ask them how many visitors instead or better yet, ask them how many actual conversions and see what they say. If you want to increase your website visitors and turn those visitors into real customers,
contact us at Concepts ‘n’ Creations to see how we can make your website work for you.

Until next time…