What is the difference between measuring “hits” and “unique visitors” on Web sites, and which should PR use? – Josh Appel October 20, 2012
Posted by appeljv in Oct. 24 communication confirmation and evaluation in RACE.trackback
There is a major difference between ‘hits’ and ‘unique visitors’ on Web sites. It is often thought that ‘hits’ describes the amount of people that visit a website per day or over a measured extended period of time. However this is not the case. ‘Hits’ is actually the amount of files that are found on a website, files could be a video or an image for example. So if you have 3 images and 2 videos on an HTML page the server requests 6 hits per the one visit.
‘Unique Visitor’s is tracked by recording the IP Adress that visits a website, this can also be done through cookies. Unique visitors essentially tracks who visits a website. If you visit a website more than once than the IP adress willl be counted only one time. This is a good way for websites to see who has viewing their websites. It is like online fingerprint.
Unique visitors should be used in PR because it will tell you much more about your audience than hits will.
An example of this would be Touch Arcade is a website that that covers and tracks the latest apps and games for iPhones and iPod Touches. They track their monthly unique visitors each month and they the amount of unique visitors in their ‘About Us’ section to show how many people use their website. This is could be seen as a PR to show the reliability of the website.
About Us, PR Contact, Advertise. Retrieved from Touch Arcade website: http://toucharcade.com/about/
Unique Visitor. (n.d.). Retrieved from Webopedia website: http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/unique_visitor.html
What is the Difference Between Hits, Visits, Unique Visitors & Page Impressions. (2009, September 11). Retrieved from Digital Pacific website: http://www.digitalpacific.com.au/blog/what-is-the-difference-between-hits-visits-unique-visitors-page-impressions/
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Prior to reading this article I believed that the definition for “hits” and “unique visitors” were synonymous. You explained it simply with easy to apply examples. I think Touch Arcade is a great example because it speaks to your definition of unique visitors and shows how PR professionals can use these tools to their advantage in a PR strategy.
Q: What types of benefits can “hits” have on a PR professional’s strategy? What advantages are there for using hits over unique visitors and vise-versa?