Virtua Software Blog

There are many elements to consider when measuring the success of your website, and some of these may vary dependent on the primary purpose of your site. However, there is one metric that is applicable to most, if not all, web sites - its popularity. Unfortunatley, many of my new clients come to me having been misinformed as to the best way to measure a web site’s popularity. One thing is for certain, you want to know how many people  have visited your web site within a given period of time.
So, how do we measure a web site’s popularity? In the olden (but not golden) days of web design (and sadly, all too often today!), hit counters were all the rage. Webmasters would often brag about how many ‘hits’ their web site received each month, often claiming some rather unbelieveable figures. Even very recently a client of mine was concerned that his local rival’s web site was getting 19,000 hits each month. A quick look at Overture’s figures for the number of people who were actually searching for that website suggested that 19,000 was about 1000 times too high! While its not inconceivable that my client’s competitor may have been making that figure up, just to intimidate my client - but for the purpose of this explanation, we’ll take those claims at face value.

Why do we need to measure?

“If you build it, they will come.” While this was true for Kevin Costner in Field of Dreams, it doesn’t hold true for web sites. People wont come to your web site unless they know about it, which means that you have to market your web site. some methods of web site marketing are completely free apart from taking a little of your time, while other methods cost money each time they direct a visitor to your web site. Whether your marketing efforts are free, cost money, or a mixture of both, you will never know how well that time and money is being spent unless you have some way of measuring.

What is a Hit?

Although the popularity of web sites was quoted in the number of ‘hits’, a quick explanation of the meaning of the term ‘hit’ will quickly reveal why it is not an accurate reflection of the success of your web site marketing efforts. Each time a file is downloaded from your web server, that counts as one hit. The problem is that most web pages are made up of more than one file.
Each web page itself is made up of at least one file which tells your computer what to display. Each photograph on that page is also a separate file. So, if every page on your site contains five photographs, each time a person clicks on that page, it counts as six hits - one for the main web page file and one for each photograph. If that person visits another page, then thats another six hits. So although you have only had one visitor to your site, your hit counter is showing twelve hits. This can lull you into a false sense of security, not to mention the amount of frustration you will feel when you can’t work out why you arent making more sales given the number of ‘hits’ your website is getting.

What is a Visit?

Really, you need to be measuring the number of people that come to your site. The correct term for this is, unsurprisingly, ‘visits’. On the positive side, most web site statistics software uses ‘visits’ as its key metric, so there is no reason to rely on the outdated measure of web site ‘hits’ anymore.

A Word of Caution

Although visits are a much more accurate reflection of the number of people coming to your web site, even these figures are not completely accurate. There is no way to measure visits with 100% accuracy due to the way that technology works. For example, if someone visits your site from their work computer and then also on their home computer, that will count as two visits. There are other scenarios in which the same person could be counted twice, but these will all be relatively few and far between. Looking at the number of visits is now considered by all knowledgeable web designers to be the best method for assessing the success of your web site marketing efforts.

Conclusion

So, now you know how to measure your visitor numbers with a good degree of accuracy, you can now start to look at how successful your web site is in turning those visitors into paying customers (known as the ‘Conversion Rate’). Armed with this information, you should be able to make small changes to your website, measure the results and see whether or not those changes were effective. There are many software programs that can measure the number of visits (and myriad other metrics that can be useful). These range in price from free to several hundreds or even thousands of pounds, but probably the best value package at the moment is Google’s own free analytics software. Its easy to install on your website and provides a level of reporting previously only available in Enterprise-level packages for the major players.

Now, if someone starts claiming that their website receives some unbelieveably high number of hits, or some web marketer claims (s)he can get you a certain level of hits per month, you can challenge them and ask whether they are talking about ‘hits’ or ‘visits’. If they are talking about ‘hits’ (or dont even know the difference!) then keep looking.

Useful Links

• Overture’s Keyword Suggestion Tool
• Goole Analytics