Since the dawn of the web and the birth of web analytics, some webmasters have reported back to their respective businesses, the number ‘hits’ their websites were getting, as a measurement of success.
I still see some businesses reporting ‘hits’ as a measure of success today, especially SMEs, where they have had little exposure to Web Analytics or little education about it. This was highlighted to me very recently and inspiration for this blog post came from a headline that caught my eye in a local business magazine, that found its way to my desk a few weeks back.
The headline read: -
200,000-plus hits on our website!
Every time I see ‘hits’ reported as a measure of success, it makes me both smile and cringe at the same time. I think over time, some people have misinterpreted this metric ‘hits’ to mean the number of visitors a website has had over a particular period of time. This is a very inaccurate interpretation and can give a false sense that a website is performing well, when someone is shown a graph plotting ‘hits’, which over time goes up to the right.
