Hits Don't Mean A Thing, Knowing What Traffic Numbers Matter

I did this article for Boating Industry Magazine. It was published in the June 2008 issue.

It never ceases to amaze me when I read in a magazine or newspaper about a company boasting of how many hits their website has had.

Do they not know how inaccurate that type of measuring traffic is? It’s time to set the record straight.

If you have a website thru a major website provider such as, Channel Blade or MWS, you have access to traffic reports. If your website was built thru an independent company, you may still have access to this report. Some companies charge extra for this, however these reports are very critical. You may have had access, but never looked at these reports. Some of the things these reports tell you is: how many visitors have been on your site, what they looked at, how they got to your site, where they are from, and how long they were on your site. Lets look at some of the different traffic tracking categories.

Hits are the total files viewed on a website for a set amount of time. Your hits for the last month maybe 1 million, but that number is useless as far as a tracking measurement. Here’s why, for each webpage you have, there are multiple files on a page. Lets say that you have ten files on your homepage. Everytime someone goes on your homepage it counts as eleven “hits”. There are ten for the files, and one for the page itself. Keeping it simple, suppose all your pages counted as eleven hits. If a visitor looked at ten pages that would be 110 hits. If you averaged 400 visitors a day that is 44,000 hits a day, or 1.3 million a month.

Visitors are how many people looked at your website for a set time frame. The issue with this for tracking purpose is that each visitor counts as one. If you went on your site three times in one day that would count as three visitors.

Unique Visitors are how many individual times your website was visited. If you were on the same computer the three times you visited the site, only counts as one unique visitor. If however, you went to another computer, and visited your site, it would count as two unique visitors.

Book marked is how many people have saved your homepage as a favorite. This is important because the potential buyer probably has looked at multiple dealer sites, and for some reason yours is important to them. You want to pay attention to this number if you’re in a real seasonal market. Shoppers start looking in the off-season for the up-coming one.

Total Page Views are how many pages were looked at on your website. This is relevant because the more pages they have looked at the more interest they have in your dealership.

Average Visitor Time is how long visitors spend on your site. This is relevant because if people aren’t looking around on your site, there maybe a functionality / layout issue. Once someone lands on your home page you only have three to four seconds to keep his or her interest.

So what should your track? I would suggest: total visitors, unique visitors, total page views, book marked, and average visitor time. This can be done monthly in an excel spreadsheet, and reported to upper management. Referring to the Hawthorne Effect, when something is measured it improves-and when something is measured and reported, it improves exponentially.