The Difference Between Hits And Unique Visitors
I hear all the time someone say “I get [fill in the number] of hits on my blog everyday”.
And I’m here to tell you…
Hits don’t matter. The number of unique visitors you get to your blog DOES matter. These two things are NOT the same number or even the same thing.
If you understand what a “hit” is and how they are generated from a blog or website, you will understand why “hits” are a very poor means to determine how much REAL traffic you are truly getting to your blog.
Each time a web page or blog post is loaded into a browser, the page itself is considered one hit. Each image that loads from that page is counted as a separate hit. Any other element that has to “load” from that page is considered yet another separate hit.
Depending on the page, a single page load from a unique visitor could be counted as 20 hits or more.
So, if somebody tells me they are getting a million hits a month, I know automatically that the unique visitors that actually visit the site are a small fraction of the number of hits.
You should also probably also know that you can accumulate hits and page loads without a visitor ever even showing up on your blog. How?
One way is from spiders and robots sent by search engines and others to your blog. These can include those silly keyword spy programs that spider sites using keywords to collect keyword intelligence (HINT: you can find the keywords any website is using with the free Google External Keyword Tool).
But the important part to know is this…
Each of these spidering activities produces hits and page loads that are NOT unique visitors.
One of the reasons that I am a big fan of Google Analytics is you can accurately know how many unique visitors came to your blog or website. And it is most likely that you find that your Google Analytics numbers will be less than most any other statistics program you will use.
One reason is because Google does a lot of spidering of websites and blogs—it makes sense because they are the top search engine on the planet. Well, they don’t count their own spidering, making their stats more accurate right off the bat.
While I do use the Stat Counter plugin and service to get a feel for immediate traffic trends in real time, I depend on Google Analytics for the bottom line, actual unique numbers of visitors that I am getting.
So don’t concern yourself with “hits”. Always concern yourself with unique visitors—the kind that walk upright, have two thumbs and are old enough to vote.
Cheers,
Steve Roye
Online Business Consultant
About the Author/Founder of the IMS Blog
This former Navy Senior Chief (ret.) and professional entertainer didn't stop when he retired from the military...Steve Roye is also an author who has also been an online business owner and consultant for almost a decade.
Now Steve focuses on helping others start or expand their online businesses.
Please check out the Featured Articles page for direct links to articles on this blog.
Last 5 posts by Steve Roye
- Entertainers Have The Edge When Building An Online Fan Club - March 11th, 2010
- 7 Secrets For Getting More Hits And More Traffic To Your WordPress Blog Now - March 8th, 2010
- The Lies About Making Money Online With Google Adsense - March 5th, 2010
- The Social Network Business Plan: 18 Wealth Strategies - March 2nd, 2010
- If You Don’t Understand Keyword Research, You’re Kinda Screwed - February 28th, 2010
2. Right-Click then Copy
3. Paste the code into page
Thank you for linking to us!
HTML Code (Blogs/Web Pages)
Tagged with: google analytics • traffic hits • traffic statistics • unique visitors • website traffic
Filed under: Getting Started
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Steve..thank you thank you for such an informative article! To a newbie, your article was so easy to understand and I didn’t have to read through 3 pages of crap to get what I was after. Wonderful.