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Web site promotion scam: using hits and visits in online marketing

Online scam artists commonly advertise the number of hits on their Web site to trick people into believing their Web site gets a lot of traffic and makes their company a lot of money. What most people don't realize is that a Web site's popularity is measured by the number of unique visitors, not the number of hits.

A hit is a single request made to a Web server for an object on your Web site. The object can be an HTML file (i.e. a Web page), a graphic image, or any other embedded object in your Web pages, such as a sound file.

A visit to your Web site represents one unique viewer (or search engine) who has visited your site. For example, let's say you have an online catalog. One person visits your site and views one of your Web pages. Your Web page has 10 unique graphic images on it (a masthead, bullet points, some photos, etc.) and a sound file. Your total number of hits would be as follows:

Number of Unique Visitors	1
Number of HTML documents downloaded	1
Number of unique graphic images downloaded	10
Number of embedded files downloaded	1
Total Number of Hits	13

1 visitor viewing 1 Web page = 13 hits

Using the above example, let's say that one person viewed 10 Web pages on your Web site and each Web page contained different graphic images. Then the total number of hits would be as follows:

Number of Unique Visitors	1
Number of HTML documents downloaded	10
Number of unique graphic images downloaded	100
Number of embedded files downloaded	10
Total Number of Hits	121

1 visitor viewing 10 Web pages = 121 hits

Another piece of information online marketers neglect to tell you is how the addition of a forward slash to your URL (i.e., Web address) also counts a hit. Look at the place you enter a Web address in your browser. Then look at the Web address you typed in. If you typed in companyname.com and the Web browser redirected the Web address to the more correct companyname.com/, that additional forward slash also registers as a hit to that one Web page.

Thus, when you hear a company advertise that their Web site receives "over 250,000 hits per month" but does not mention the number of unique visitors, you know to proceed with caution.

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