Monday, August 13, 2007
Hits, Visitors, Unique Visitors and Page Views Defined
In July of 2007 PAontheweb.com went over 1.7 million page views. Everyone wants to know what the difference is between Hits, Visitors, Unique Visitors and Page Views.
PAontheweb looks closely at Page Views since that is the number of times we can expose a site wide advertiser to the public. A Hit is a series of links on that particular page that is seen by the public. Looking at it as Hits, PAontheweb received over 4 million hits in July 2007.
These Hits and Page Views were generated by 142,576 Visitors. The number of Unique Visitors was 82,429.
Without getting too technical about it, Unique Visitors is very unreliable because of the way the internet works. When a visitor comes to a website the I.P. address of the computer connecting to the website is checked. That is a unique visitor. The problem with this is many companies run off of one I.P. address. If a company has 10 or a thousand computers and more than one individual looks at the same site it is only counted as one Unique Visitor.
Visitors are not the best way to measure your website success either. In the case of PAontheweb.com, many Visitors click a website, see what is provided click a link on the page and are taken to another website. The real measure of our success is how many pages are viewed in a given month. That means a site visitor has actually seen your ad or link. They may not have clicked it but they did see it.
The bottom line is the more times you’re exposed to the public the better off you are. If you need Brand Identity we suggest using an image link. If you’re interested in more clicks we suggest a text link to go with your image or a simple text link.
Text links are clicked on more frequently than images. Most people have trained themselves to not click images. The reason is simple. For years, advertisers used image ads for Pop Up advertising and this caused people to stop clicking images. While PAontheweb.com uses Pop Ups when you click a link it is not an advertising pop up. If you click one of our links we are supposing you may not find what you want. If you close that window you will be brought back to the page you were on. You can then check out the next link.
In some cases our advertisers request that their link not open in a pop up. In these cases we comply and you will have to navigate back to PAontneweb.com to do another search.
I know this went beyond the question about Hits, Visitors and Page Views. However, it is all intertwined with they way we do business.
