Misleading Web Stats

It gets me every time. An owner of a website is bragging, "I get 120,000 hits per day" You think to yourself, Wow, that is a lot of traffic... but in reality.. it is very misleading. I am not sure when or where, but somewhere along the line the general public was informed a "hit" is the same thing as a "page view". That is not true. let me explain why this is misleading.

You could have 20 images on a particular web page. Once that page is viewed by the browser is counts as 21 hits. Here is the breakdown. Every time anything on a web page hits the server, it counts as a "hit" (hence the name, a file is "hitting the server"). Since there are 20 images and one HTML file hitting the server, that counts as 21 hits. That is why the term "hit" is totally misleading and useless in a statistics environment. The important stats to look at are Page views, Unique Visitors and Time spent by an end user in your site. Those are the factors that speak volumes about the interface and context of your website. Those stats tell you, if it broke or fixed. So remember, throw out the term "hit", (when speaking of your web stats) unless your main purpose is to confuse someone, then by all means use it freely. =)

Speaking of stats, I love the fact Google is taking the website statistics industry by storm. I really do love Google Analytics. That is spoken like a true web geek.