Re: Hit Counts v User Sessions

These stats are after all for pleasing your clients, and gaining new ones.
Use what CNN and The NY Times do.

Page Views - Not an accurate measure for your main page, for example, as a
client can enter your site from any listed page, and leave from that page
too, without ever looking at your main page.
Hit Counts - Also not accurate for the reasons stated previously
Unique visitors - The only useful measure.

We started using StatsServer from www.mediahouse.com due to suggestions made
on this list a while back, and all this information is plainly displayed.
For example, I have a lot of repeat viewers to the site, and while this is
an impressive number of page views, the actual unique number of visitors is
lower than this number over a range (1 week, 1 month), because the viewers
come back and view the same pages.

David Godfrey
Webmaster/Developer
PG Music Inc.


-----Original Message-----
From: Joe Keilholz <jkeilholz(at)thedepot.com>
To: hwg-business(at)hwg.org <hwg-business(at)hwg.org>; hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org
<hwg-techniques(at)hwg.org>
Date: April 07, 2000 2:02 PM
Subject: Hit Counts v User Sessions


>Hello All,
>
>I have recently been confronted with an interesting conversation concerning
user sessions and hit counts. A friend at a local web design company has
stated that they use the hits from the analyzers as the guideline for
collecting data and then use these statistics for prospective new clients. I
was perplexed by this because from my view, if you have one person viewing
the website and ten images on the page, you receive ten hits. However, the
user sessions will allow you to see the unique IP addresses that individuals
come from and give you a better feel for how many people have visited the
site. When I explained this to her and asked why they use hit counts and not
user sessions she replied that she didn't know but that the majority of all
web design companies use these numbers instead of user session. This I was
also perplexed by, because I knew of some companies in the past that had
used this method but have since gone to using user sessions instead due to
the varying degree!
>!
> of results. My question for all you (after this huge rambling) is-- do the
majority of web companies use hit counts or do they use user sessions?
>
>Thanks in Advance,
>Joe Keilholz
>
>Finally...The Web Your Way.
>http://www.thedepot.com
>

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