Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Why do the marketing guys reference hits?

Everyone who has ever run a web server and worked with web statistics knows that "hits" don't really matter. Beware of a marketing firm pushing web site hits in their statistics, it's not an accurate assessment of your traffic. "Visitor Sessions" is what you should be looking for.

Hits are misleading by nature because they count each and every file on a page like images and the page itself. For example you can have a single web page with 20 images on it, resulting 21 hits. Easy to see why marketing firms like to use hits instead, really easy to pass them off as unique visitors too since the term hits was coined in the early days of the internet and not to mention publicised to hell on television.

My company, Red Olive a creative firm in Utah, has used a multitude of stats programs to track search engine optimization efforts for websites. Most fell short in that they weren't real-time or couldn't get to logs on other servers "easily". WebTrends is overpriced and under delivers, but if you like customizing your own software and are looking for a good base app to start with, I suggest surfstatslive.com. Written in easy to manage ASP, just pull up the code and modify it to meet your needs and skin it. Works awesome for us and has all the features, including PPC campaign tracking, sales funnels, etc. Or you can always use the FREE Google analytics , gets the job done and is totally no cost.

If you are interested in search engine optimization, check out our red olive corporate blog site for server and creative coding tips.

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