Measuring the effect of your web site on the bottom line
by Lisa Moses
The true usefulness of counting "hits" is one of the World Wide Web's great mysteries. And its likely to stay a puzzle until a standard interpretation of that unit of measure is adopted. However, data on your web site's traffic can be captured in a variety of ways, and more importantly, be used to help you sell your ideas to senior management, justify what you're doing or devise more targeted marketing and communication strategies.
"Hit" is the universally accepted term for a "visit" to a web site or part of one. A hit is one visit to one element of a web page. Since web pages often contain several elements (such as graphics, headers and footers) one click of the mouse may count as a dozen or more hits, depending on the complexity of the page.
For example, a site may get 10,000 hits a day on all of its web pages. But if the site has an average of eight graphics and one sound file per page, then 10 hits are counted every time one person visits that page. This means that the site really had 1,000 visitors that made up the 10,000 hits.
But hits matter because they are the closest thing the Internet has to readership levels. Web site hosts use hits to measure the bandwidth consumed by a site and base their rates accordingly. Site owners like to quote high hit levels to attract advertising revenues (an established way of paying for web sites). But these claims often overstate the true traffic by counting failed and repeated attempts by one person to access the same page.
While there are no consistently reliable measures of audience size, you can establish measurement and interpretation systems on your site that meet your needs. Here are some factors to consider when setting up your tracking system:
First, decide what visitor information you need: A count of visitors only? E-mail addresses of visitors? Other information about visitors? What files visitors have read? What time of day or week your site is most active? Then, decide what tools to use to get that information:
A Counter?
Counters, often seen at the bottom of site home pages, do not track hits; rather, they track the number of visits. Repeat visits by the same person are counted as new visits.
A Cookie?
A cookie is a data file that allows the site owner to capture information about visitors' personal computer systems and activity during site visits. Web servers can then use this information to customize web site pages to specific visitors.
An E-Mail Link?
An e-mail link (to a person in your organization) at the end of a story or a product description lets visitors respond immediately, either to provide feedback or ask for more information.
A Form?
Forms allow you to gather more details about visitors. They identify the number of visitors to your site who were interested enough to respond to your online ad or other posting, and ask for more specific information that you might need. This is the only way to capture a visitor's complete e-mail address.
[Source: IABC/Toronto newsletter.]
