The Motive Web Design Glossary
hits (website statistics)
A hit is a request for a file made by a user-agent. User-agents include web browsers and search engine indexing programs, or spiders.
Each time a webpage is viewed a user-agent requests the individual files that make up the page from the computer where the website is stored (web server). A record of the hits received is automatically created and saved as part of monitoring the web server performance. This record is called a web server log.
A web server log can be processed and the resulting statistics interpreted to build a picture of how people might be using a website.
One webpage, many hits
Hits are commonly misinterpreted as a metric for website success, however the number of hits rarely translates to the number of people visiting a website.
… the number of hits rarely translates to the number of people visiting a website.
Nor are the number of hits the same as the number of webpages viewed. Individual webpages accessed, or ‘page views’ or visitor numbers, are a more meaningful metric.
A webpage is typically made up of a number of individual files. When a webpage is viewed, each of these files is requested from the web server, and each file request increases the hit-count for the website.
For example, if a homepage comprises:
- 1 HTML document;
- 2 stylesheets;
- 10 images and;
- 1 Javascript file;
then 14 hits will be added to the hit-count each time the homepage is viewed.
Hit-and-cache
Repeat-users generate fewer hits.
Determining website-use on the basis of hit-count is further complicated by the browser storing webpage files locally (caching). This is done to make using a website ‘quicker’. Once in-cache, a file is not requested from the server when the webpage is viewed.
Repeat-users generate fewer hits.
Video ‘hits’
The term ‘hit’ has also been appropriated as youth-friendly jargon - a ‘hit’ as view of an online video – possibly popularised by the marriage of short-format-friendly music video and web-as-distribution channel.
With online video services such as YouTube, a hit is more likely to correlate to the number of people who have viewed the video. Depending of the service, the audience for the video can be explored in more detail.
For example – of all the people who started watching the video - how many watched through to the end? At what point did they lose interest and hit the pause button or link away to another website or video?
Search engines are user-agents too
Although polite spiders often identify themselves to the server (making it easier to filter search engine ‘noise’ out of the web server log), each time a website is indexed, the hit-count is inflated by the number of webpages indexed.
Based on the fine-tuning of the Motive glossary (Nov-Dec 2004), the ratio is approximately 3:1; three search engine spider visits to each ‘human’ visit.
cache, crawler/robot/spider, HTTP, IP address, log file analysis, referrer logs, web server, traffic
References and further reading
- Page views are obsolete (Evan Williams)
25 Aug 06: Taking into account poor page construction and the increasing use of RSS to distribute content, should ‘time-spent’ be the preferred metric?
Glossary A-Z