During my meetings with several clients I noticed the confusion some of the web jargon is creating when they try to read results for their websites. This article will explain in plain English what all these terms mean and hopefully clear the confusion.

Hits

“I get 100,000 hits a day” – you hear someone bragging about their website.

Translation: That means exactly nothing.

“Hit” means a file is being sent by the server hosting your website to the web browser whenever a web page is loaded. Here’s an example: If you have a web page with 10 images that was loaded in a browser by 1 visitor, your hit counter will show the number 11.

Why?

That is because the hit counter registers 10 hits for the images + 1 for the file itself where the images reside. Does this give you any indication of the traffic to your website? Not unless you keep track of all the web pages you have, all the images on each page and do the math for the entire site. That’s pretty confusing. All in all “hits” don’t mean too much or at the most don’t show accurately what’s going on with your site.

Page Views

This component it’s a bit more accurate than “hits” but still do not give you a clear picture of where your website stands. If your “Page Views” is equal to 10 that means 2 things:

1. 10 Visitors saw 1 web page or
2. 1 Visitor viewed 10 pages

That is still not giving you an accurate reading, especially if you are trying to obtain precise statistics on your website. The one element of web statistics (stats) that you really should pay attention to is:

Visitors

This will show you exactly how many people have visited your site. Based on this number you can definitely make assumptions and gear your web promoting efforts towards traffic – and that’s what matters the most.

If you are running any paid inclusions you should probably know about PPC.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

This is in fact the amount of money you pay a search engine every time someone clicks on your ad you had setup with them.

This is in a nut shell a simple way of explaining the elements you should look at whenever you check your stats for your website.

 Claudiu Geanta is a serial entrepreneur and founder of Design by Satori Inc. & Satori CG Inc.. He helps businesses promote their presence on and off line. He is also an accomplished web designer, book writer and photographer. You can follow him on Twitter.
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