What are hits?

Dictionary.com defines "hits" as: "a connection made to a website over the Internet or another
network." *

This is actually quite vague. A "hit" is actually a "successful request to your web server from a visitor's browser for any type of file, whether an image, HTML page, an MP3 file, or any other type. A single web page can cause many Hits -- one for each image included on the page, etc." ^

Therefore, if a single web page contains 20 images, that's 21 hits - 20 images plus 1 for the page itself. If one single person looks at 10 web pages which contains 20 images on each page, that single individual is responsible for 210 hits.

Some internet websites will say things like "our site gets 2 million hits per month." That sounds impressive, but it's completely misleading.

A website could have an average of 50 images or other elements per page, while another website could be all text-based. Or worse, a particular website could have hundreds of tiny 1x1 (pixel) transparent graphics that are invisible. Fifty people in one month could easily accumulate 2 million hits if they visited just 5 pages on that website every day.

Traffic reported as "hits" should be open to skepticism. However, the problem is when someone uses "hits" as a phrase to talk about real people visiting their website (a.k.a. "unique visitors" or "sessions"). In these cases, you don't know if they are really talking "hits" or actual "visitors".

"Unique visitors" or "sessions" is the best method of measuring traffic ("pageviews" is another, but we'll talk about that later).

Urchin defines "sessions" as "a series of clicks on your site by an individual visitor during a specific period of time. A Session is initiated when the visitor arrives at your site, and it ends when the browser is closed or there is a period of inactivity." ^

This method is a good way to know how much real traffic your site is getting. If a website says "We get 2,000 sessions per day," that's impressive. But if they say "We get 2,000 hits per day," you just can't be sure.

"Pageviews" is another great method of gauging your website traffic.

Urchin defines "pageviews" this way: "... a request from a visitor's browser for a displayable web page, generally an HTML file... In general, images and other embedded content, such as style sheets and javascript, are not considered to be Pageviews." ^

If a site says they receive 2,000 "pageviews" per day, that's pretty good.

* Dictionary.com
^ from Urchin 5 Site Statistics software