Analytics 101 – Hits, Pageviews, Impressions and Unique Visitors Defined…

There are literally dozens of elements of the web traffic statistical data model that must be understood to properly measure the effectiveness of your web site. Today, we’re going to talk about four of them.

These four fundamental terms are the ones you should be most familiar with – especially when it comes to gauging the effectiveness of a marketing campaign. Unfortunately, they seem to be the least understood and/or most widely confused with each other.

You often see or hear about a given site that claims, “1 million hits per month”. But what does that mean, really? Does that mean that 1 million people visited that site?

Hits

This term is bandied about quite loosely, yet is probably the single least understood of any statistical term in the history of the interwebs. Don’t get me wrong – it’s not a useless piece of information by any stretch. It’s just to say that it is a stretch to think that this statistic by itself will give you anything other than an inflated ego.

A hit is a unit of measure referring to a single server request. However – that doesn’t mean that 1 (fully loaded) “page” = 1 Hit. It’s referring to individual file requests within the overall content request. Let’s take the JohnnyGeek.com home page as an example…

The JohnnyGeek.com “homepage” consists the PHP file itself, and contained within the HTML are references to pull in various css, js and graphic files to create the visual UI structure – another few dozen files. Then we’ve got the ads, the js files and pixels for various tracking, and any number of other “stuff” that is loaded when the page loads.

If you load this single “page” – www.JohnnyGeek.com – you’ve just created a whopping 103 “hits” for that one page load.

A quickie way to see this in action is to (in Safari – figure it out on your other browsers…) open up the Activity window while a page is loading. It will tell you how many calculable elements are contained within that current request.

Back in the old days when a web “page” was just that – a page…with some text…and maybe an image or two – hits were used to gauge traffic. This isn’t (and simply can’t be) the case anymore.

---

Pageviews

Pageviews is a calculation of how many times a given page (regardless of it’s number of individual elements) is viewed. Say a visitor lands on your home page – that’s 1 pageview. The same visitor clicks to an article page – that’s another pageview. By dividing the total number of pageviews with total number of unique visitors, you can get an idea how many pageviews each visitor generates.

Now we’re getting somewhere.

---

Impressions

An Impression is a very critical marketing term, and refers to how many times a given element (image, text, video, etc.) is served up. (How many times a given banner ad was “hit”; loaded up in a page.)

Impressions are typically calculated in bulk by units of 1000, referred to as CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions).

Yes…I know that’s stupid. M would make one think millions. Why is it not CPT? Well, apparently marketing weenies thought a little Latin would spice things up, so the term is Cost Per Mille (Latin for per thousand).

If an advertising network is paying $3/CPM for a given ad, that means you are getting paid $3 for every 1000 times the ad is presented on your site.

Now, before your gears start spinning…don’t let that make you think you can just go hit your own site 1000 times and make $3. Advertisers aren’t this stupid (anymore). Impressions are almost always calculated on Unique Visitors.

On a side note – you need to be BLOCKING yourself from your statistics anyway. You obviously load your site more than anyone else, and including yourself in the calculations will most definitely skew your perspective.

---

Visits / Unique Visitors

Visits are normally (when calculated correctly) equivalent to Unique Visitors. Think of it as the number of different people that visit your page. This is typically determined by your analytical software via the use of cookies, tracking of IP address, or both.

I say typically – because it varies. For example, if you have two computers in your home, they both use the same “public” IP address. Meaning, both computers appear as one single entity from an IP perspective to sites you visit, however can appear as two entities if the site you’re visiting is only using a method of tracking that is specific to the actual machine – like cookies – rather than something specific to the connection – like your overall network’s public IP.

When determining the “traffic” to your site, if you were only going to refer to ONE single metric – Unique Visitors is the one you’d refer to.

So – the site that claims, “1 Million Hits per month” may indeed have 1 million hits. However, that may actually boil down to only thousands of Unique Visitors. It’s all in the numbers – and to gain a clear picture of your site’s performance, it’s quite rare that you only need one number.

###