Hits Versus Unique Visitors

[drang3d]

I just received an email advertising an online property site. They were looking for advertisers but the thing that rubbed me up the wrong way was that their pitch was largely made up of the amount of hits they receive each month (650,000). Now I myself know its unique visitors that count and not hits. But I also know there are many out there that are not techies and will fall for this marketing ploy. Do the members of REW think it's ethical to pitch services like this based on hits?

[BrandonSternfield]

It's about as ethical as car companies saying <car model x> gets an estimate 20 mpg.

They aren't lying. They just aren't giving the truth.

Oh, and I estimate my worth around 6 billion. Just for the record.

[Graeme]

They are relying on the fact that you don't know what you are doing and you'll be amazed by the stats.

We are still in the WildWest when it comes to standards.

[Eric Blackwell]

They are relying on the fact that you don't know what you are doing and you'll be amazed by the stats.

We are still in the WildWest when it comes to standards.

At this point I think it is unethical to use hits as a way to impress people. You jogged my memory...a while ago Calgary posted in his REW blog about even pageviews being a dead metric. Ahhh yes....here it is.

http://www.realestatewebmasters.com/...ltor/231/show/

I won't go quite that far, but I do think that you need a couple of metrics alongside just pageviews to make them meaningful--such as x number of pageviews from y number of unique visitors or so forth.

Hits are TOTALLY irrelevent. Any of us could manufacture million of them just with site design alone...

Best;

Eric

[BrandonSternfield]

Unique's can be faked too.

There are sites online that I know exist underground, that you simply download the program, and add your website to their list. When you run the progam you start seeing websites. For ever 5 other sites you see, someone sees your website. Basically to inflate uniques. I'm sure big companies use it.

I think it's pointless for us, since we aren't selling the name though.

[ericbramlett]

There's an agent in town that runs a TV commercial bragging about the # of hits to his website. I think he's in the dark about hits/uniques, though. He's paying all that money for TV time to drive traffic to his site I think I know a cheaper/more effective way

[jerome]

Dat Gum Ol' TV Advertising Realtors!

[gibex]

ask them to give you some stats.

[NealRM]

It's about as ethical as car companies saying <car model x> gets an estimate 20 mpg.

They aren't lying. They just aren't giving the truth.

Oh, and I estimate my worth around 6 billion. Just for the record.

I think a better example would be "It's about as ethical as calling a small house 'cosy'".

Hit, pageviews, visitors, unique visitors, time on site, page per visitor, ..... all are statistical measurements. All need to be interpretedproperly and none tell the complete story.

So what does 650,000 hits mean. On it's own, very little. Vistors requesed information from the site's servers 650,000 times latest month. I would expect a site with a medium amount of traffic to hit that every few days. So unless each visitor is causing only 10 to 20 hits, he is not getting much traffic.

[Lydia]

Google spiders between 350 and 750 of my pages a day, so I guess I can report another 17000+ pages served per month now. ;-)

I agree with the general consensus- hits is meaningless as a metric.