Harking back to my last post about educating on the topics near and dear to interactive agencies, I’ve arrived at another topic; hits are not visitors. These metrics are incredibly useful when evaluating a site for marketing purposes, hardware requirements, coding methods and load times.

So first, let’s define the difference.
A “Hit” is a successful request to your web server from a visitor’s browser for any type of file, including an image, HTML page, MP3 file etc… A single Web page can account for several hits. A simple page might include a logo image, CSS file, HTML code, 6 image based navigation items with 6 more images for rollover effects. The net hits for such a simplistic page would be 15.

By contrast, a “Visitor” or “Session” is a series of clicks by a particular user on your site. If I load the same simple web page in the previous example it would be considered 1 visit. Sessions / Visitors to your site are all given a unique anonymous IDs which track the user throughout the site. The “session state” is used by the Web site to remember things like login information and shopping cart contents.

For comparison purposes let’s look at an example of the differences between hits and visitors using one of our clients for the month of March 2008.

Total Hits: 792,487
Total Visitors: 26,104

So yes, it is important to note the difference in the two measures.

A special note though; Google Analytics won’t track Hits because it uses JavaScript to check visitor behavior and for this reason Google isn’t aware of every hit back to the Web server.

Google has announced a new feature; the ability to share your Google Analytics data with the public and Google. At first this may seem counterintuitive especially for companies who guard their Analytics data; however there are some very useful instances to consider data sharing.

There are two aspects to the Data Sharing feature of Google Analytics:

Share with Google Products Only (by default)
It’s important to note that by default Google will share your data with other Google services unless you’ve opted out. The real plus of this feature is the benefits you’ll gain with Google Conversion Optimizer. Assuming you are using Google AdWords. Conversion Optimizer will offer automatic bid management tied to your maximum CPA goals. But Conversion Optimizer hasn’t been released just yet, so we’ll have to wait to see how good this really is.

Share with Google Products and Benchmarking Service
First off, it is all anonymous. The concept behind the benchmarking service is sort of a “I’ll show you mine, you show me yours” approach to industry trends. By opting in to the service you agree to submit your Web traffic data to a greater pool of annoymous statistics. In theory once this is available you’ll be able to better compare the performance of your site verses the industry.

A Recommendation to Google
Give the site owner the option of showing snippets of analytics code on their Web site. This would be useful for any site which is ad revenue driven. It would give advertisers greater transparency to the performance of various advertising channels.

A few weeks back I was introduced to ReInvigorate web statistics, a (currently) free service for tracking website metrics. I’ve used most of the major web statistics tools including Google Analytics, Urchin, WebTrends and ClickTracks, but ReInvigorate is different. What strikes you at first when using the system is the simplicity of the interface and the organization of content. The overall system is presented in a clean and logical layout and it’s impossible not to notice the “Web 2.0″ look of the site.

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For well over a year now, we’ve been using Google Analytics to report our own traffic and give our clients a feature rich, and free way to view their own website statistics. Prior to Google Analytics we used Urchin 5.0, which was acquired by Google and made free just 1 month after we purchased a $900 license for our server. The nice people at Google gave us 50 user account to ease the pain.

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