The next time you're told your Web site "now has 5,000 hits a day", think again. It might only be a few dozen visitors. You have fallen foul of a nasty practice in the Web industry - the use of "hit- rates" to impress unsuspecting customers and bosses.
The numbers game is all- important as the Web becomes more commercialised: more page-views means higher advertising rates and more revenue. But hit rates aren't the same as the number of site visitors - though they are often spoken about to managers or customers as if they were. Hit rates are the number of times each "object" within a Web page is requested (or "hit") by browser software.
A single page can contain dozens of objects, from images and text to sound files and "applets". So one visitor will also generate dozens of hits each time they load the page.
Last Friday's Irish Times online, for example, had 32 graphics, from editorial photo- graphs to logos and advertising banners. So one page-view by one person would generate at least 32 hits - a half dozen visitors would generate several hundred hits.
"Raw hit rates aren't really a measure of user-visits at your site," says one Webmaster in Dublin (name withheld). "They really just measure how close your server is to reaching full capacity. Giving them out to clients and passing them off as your online readership is fairly widespread but it's a con-job - it takes advantage of the technological illiteracy of clients or managers."
A paper by Thomas Novak and Donna Hoffman of Vanderbilt University in the States, New Metrics For New Media: Toward The Development Of Web Measurement Standards, is a must-read for anyone interested in the field of Web audience measurement. They define a visit as "a series of consecutive Web page requests from a visitor to a Web site".
Novak and Hoffman argue: "Other than ignorance of the meaninglessness of hits, the only reason we feel a Web site would report numbers of hits is that this is typically a large and very impressive sounding number."