September 1, 2003
 
Truths, Lies and Misconceptions:  The Hit Counter.
 
How do we measure the success of a website? Very often we hear about "hit counts." Web developers selling their services will sometimes boast of very large numbers of hits -- thousands per day, for example -- as evidence that the site they have developed for a previous client is in fact being used and read.
 
To find out whether this is true or not, one has to understand a bit about how website statistics are compiled.
 
Every time a website is accessed, that website generates a record on the hosting computer. These records are stored in a log file that can be reviewed using various kinds of computer programs that interpret the raw data.
 
The"Hit Counter", is the most widely used and abused measurement tool.  The “Hit Counter” found at the bottom of most mediocre websites usually displays a large number. It's sometimes very large indeed. But “hits” are a raw count of every single file of every type downloaded from the web server. This means every obscure graphic image as well. A web page, laden with graphics, can produce 10, 20 or more hits each time it is accessed. Hit counts are, therefore, usually grossly inflated numbers.
 
In reality, websites record -and these programs review- three important log files: hits, page views, and unique visitors.
 
Page views provide much better data and usually show how many times web pages (which are called HTML files) are downloaded. Each time a page is accessed and read, the log file will record the event.  Sites that have lots of content however, will have higher page views even if the number of visitors is lower.
 
The best log file we have at our disposal is the third one – “Unique Visitors”. (This is sometimes called hosts or IP addresses). Every computer as it is connected to the Internet is assigned a unique IP or Internet Protocol address. This log counts the number of individual computers which have accessed your website, so in theory this would count the actual number of visitors to the site.
 
However, computers that are not permanently connected to a network -- for example, computers equipped with dial up modems that are used to obtain Internet access -- are assigned new addresses each time they connect. (This is called dynamic IP addressing.) A business owner accessing his own website once daily using a modem may be counted as 365 unique visitors in one year.
 
On the other hand, connecting through an Internet Service Provider using a modem usually means that web pages are filtered through a proxy server. What does this mean for your count? If 1,000 of your customers connect to your site through such a proxy server, they might all be seeing the web page as it is stored by their Internet Service Provider. You'd be getting a count of only one unique visitor (when there were really a thousand).
 
The lesson:  Hit Counts are worthless, Page Views only slightly better, and Unique Visitors are distorted by dynamic addressing and proxy servers.  The Bottom Line:  Use all of the statistics at hand as a whole body of knowledge from which to draw your assumptions.  Remember to ask your customers if they’ve seen your website lately.