Murphy's letter from Edinburgh

I got it wrong with hits and visits

I got it wrong with the hits and visitors when I gave the information in some previous letters, and for that I make an apology.  It's an easy mistake too make, so that is why I am going to correct the erroneous letters that I put in as visitors to Murphy's Letter from Edinburgh.

I think most people think that hits are the amount of people that are site visitors when in fact that is totally wrong.

Last year at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, I was speaking to another photographer who had a site up and running and we got talking about figures such as hits and other parts of running a website.  In that conversation he mentioned visitors and hits.  

Normally there is so much going on at the film festival with stars coming and going, you tend never to finish the conversation, so I thought no more about it until I recalled the conversation just a few weeks ago and decided to type into the search engine on hits and visits.  The section was there, and it explains the differences between hits and visits.

You will often here people taking about hits.  And like me, some tend to think that this is the amount of people coming on to their sites.  But this has nothing to do with the amount of people coming on to your site.

Hits explained:

If you go onto any site that has pages with graphics, photographs or logos, that site will get a hit for the page that is opened.  If you have ten photographs or logos on that page, you will get eleven hits for that page being looked at.  So if you have a lot of pages with graphics, photographs or logos, you can expect to get a lot of hits on your site, but that can be due too one visitor coming on to your site and having a good look around.  Hits let you see what pages are being looked at, so they are still a useful indication as to what is going on with your site.  But they have nothing to do with the amount of visitors that are looking at the site.

This is where I went wrong when I put up the figures to show how well my sites were doing, as I said I would do from time to time when I set my sites up.  I called the hits site visitors when they were not.  Television reporters tend to state how many hits a site may have had when they are doing a story on a new site, but again that has nothing to do with visitors or how many people are really coming onto the site.

My friends also thought hits were the indicator to let you know how many people were visiting your site.  People who have being running site for a long time, but again they were wrong by default.

Understanding visits:

Anyone who runs a website will have a statistics counter that gives all sorts of information such as hits which is what most people will look at and often use to describe how well a site is doing, but when you look at the chart properly it will also give you a lot of other information such as visits, pages, files, unique sites, unique URLs and how many KBytes have been used on that site.  Visitors are the people who are coming to that site to look at the material on it.  These are the figures that will tell you how many people are visiting that site.

Unique Sites and unique URLs are also important because these are the return visitors who are coming back to that site within a given period of time.  And of course Gigabytes and KBytes are also an important indicator as to how well a site is doing and how much material is being looked at.

I think I now understand the information, and I make an apology for getting it wrong when I wrote those previous letter.  But again I should thank that chance conversation with another photographer and looking into what he said in a chance conversation last August.

I have made some charts up for the three sites for Murphy's Edinburgh below, so that you can understand the way it all works and how to look at the figures properly.  The figures below are genuine and have been taken from my statistics counter to the end of March 2006 so that you can understand the way statistics with hits and visitors works.

As I said from the beginning that it's sometimes by trial and error that you learn things on the Internet.  And this was by trial and error, the error being on my part and through many other wrong sources.

The www.ifedinburgh.co.uk will close down on the 18 May 2006

The www.murphysedinburgh.com and www.murphysedinburgh.co.uk will now remain as the main sites for Murphy's Edinburgh

As you can see below, these are the hits that the three Murphy's Edinburgh sites have had since I set the first site up on 7 June 2004.  But again they are not visitors, they are hits and this is where most people go wrong, including me.  Given that I have a lot of graphics on my sites, I should have a lot of hits as people look at the material on display.  But there again I am very happy with the amount of visits that I have had since I set my sites up.

Written by Andrew Murphy 3 April 2006

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