Over the last several years, one of our clients has tracked HITS on their website. Why? Well because they have a competitor that tracks its. Awstat offers it as a trackable feature, but any third party reputable tracking site or Google Analytics will tell you hits mean absolutely nothing when it comes to traffic nor does it effect any measures. Though we have tried to explain that what we are tracking (visitors, unique visitors, and length of time on site) is what they do indeed need to be measuring,  they want HITS.

So what is my client thinking? I can only guess one of two things:

1) That Blue Olive can’t track hits.

2) That Blue Olive can track hits but the numbers must not be good so we don’t want to share it with them.

Neither is the case – but the dilemma remains. 

So what is a hit and why is it not worth tracking? A hit is anything on a site that has to open, if you don’t believe me feel free to check it out on wiki.  If a web page has four graphics then it would receive five hits. One hit for opening the page and one for each graphic, therefore hits can be manipulated simply by adding lots of items on the page that is opened, the down side of  hits, it slows down the site.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 18th, 2011 at 8:30 am and is filed under From The Top of the Jar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.