Those Misleading Traffic Stats
phantom hits?
“But, Baby, you know I love you — look at all those page-hits I’ve been sending your weblog!”
The lady in question would be a fool to swallow that line. Likewise, it’s foolhardy for anyone to gauge the marketing value of a weblog (or the professional qualities of its editor) by giving any significant credence to its “web traffic” figures, whether counted as “page hits” or “individual visitors”. For weblog boosters to suggest otherwise seems — to me — to be very misleading.
See the FTC Policy Statement on Deception (“the Commission will find deception if there is a representation, omission or practice that is likely to mislead the consumer acting reasonably in the circumstances, to the consumer’s detriment”); and FTC Policy Statement Regarding Advertising Substantiation (“Objective claims for products or services represent explicitly or by implication that the advertiser has a reasonable basis supporting these claims. These representations of substantiation are material to consumers.”)
As is explained at MarketingTerms.com, a hit is a ”Request of a file from a Web server.”
The term “hit” is perhaps the most misused term in online marketing, mistakenly used to mean unique visitors, visits, page views, or all of the above. A hit is merely a request for a file from a Web server. A request for a Web page counts as a hit, but so does a request for a graphic on a Web page. Since the number of graphics per page can vary considerably, hits mean very little for comparison purposes.
I started hearing about the vastly over-inflated numbers used (and, indeed, intentionally manipulated) by webloggers before I started this weblog. I became particularly suspicious last October, when — a month after I declared the site dormant and stopped all posting — my page hits were down only 14% from my very best numbers.
Dennis Kennedy noted when his site hit the Magic Million-Hit Mark, ”the number of hits statistic can be very misleading, especially given all the hits on a site (especially a blog site) that happen automatically by robots, spiders and other software animals few of us really understand.” Also, one industry observer stated in an article almost four years ago:
“[P]lacing too much importance on page views and unique visitors is folly. Some analysts believe an over-reliance on those types of statistics contributed to flooding the e-commerce world with businesses destined to failure. (E-Commerce Times, Lies, Damned Lies, and Unique Visitors, June 21, 2000)
That’s why it pains me to see the esteemed Jerry Lawson, treating weblog traffic numbers as an important indicator of the power of weblogs, and pointing to Dennis Kennedy’s tripling of website traffic in 2003 as a meaningful event. [Honest, I'm not picking on you guys; it's just that you're among the small number of sites I regularly monitor.] Those numbers tells us next to nothing about the “quality” of the hits. [Just Counting Site Visits Is No Longer Enough, (Washington Post, August 15, 2001)]
We need to be far less effusive in “selling” the importance of weblogs as a marketing tool — at least until we can gauge whether the “visitors” are human and the humans are doing any buying.
update (Sept. 10, 2005): For several months now, I’ve been using two (free) services that
count “unique visitors.” It appears that actual visitors are about 50% of my “page loads,”
and tend to be 6 to 10 percent of “hits” measured by my webserver.
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Over two decades have passed since I drove around DC and Northern Virginia in my aging VW Rabbit singing “Lawyers in Love,” smiling at the adolescent double entendre of “