August 25, 2012

Understand Website Terminology

You all have heard about websites and their ranking statistics reported by Alexa,Google and various other similar sites.But what is the criteria of ranking these websites ? Some would say its the Hits on the website,the other would stuck on the point of Page views. But what is it which is considered in calculations of web traffic? Today this post will make you familiar with the terms and their importance.

Hits

Hits is also known as request and it’s the total number of files loaded when a single page is requested from the web server. So how hits are calculated? For example – a single web page with 15 images (transparent.gif, header-background.gif, etc)is loaded, that’s 15 hits for starters. The web page has 10 photos (jammie.jpg, group-photo.jpg, etc), that’s another 10 hits. If you add up the CSS files, Javascript files and all the external files, each time a web page is loaded, it can easily build up more than 50 hits. If you clear cache, reload the page, another 50+ hits again.
Hits are rarely used to to judge a website’s traffic nowadays as they are not really accurate. The numbers are big and certainly cool, but generally useless.Measuring traffics in hits usually returns you a proudly large number.

Pageviews

Pageviews is a calculation of how many times a page is viewed. Say a visitor lands on your main page, that’s 1 pageview. Same visitor clicks to About Us page, that’s another pageview. By dividing total pageviews with total unique visitors, you can get an idea how many pageviews each visitor generates.


Impressions

Impression is more or less a marketing term, normally calculated in bulk of 1000. It counts how many times a element (image, text, video) appears on a web page. If a advertisement network is paying $3/CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions), that means you are getting paid $3 when the banner appears 1000 times on your web page.

Visits / Unique Visitors

Visits is normally equivalent to unique visitors. Think of it as the number of different people (different IP) that visits your web page. Visits or unique visitors are the most essential numbers of all, when it comes to determine the traffic of a specific site.


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