HIT – Number of hits on web pages
The number of hits on a web page, also called “hits”, indicates how often the elements of the page or its subpages were called up by visitors on the WWW. Each individual access, regardless of whether it was to an HTML page or a graphic, is counted. This results in many hits per page view. It is not distinguished whether these hits were made by one or more visitors.
One hit – one visitor?
The number of hits does not yet indicate the number of visitors to a page. A website is built on many different elements, for example CSS (Cascading Style Sheet), navigation buttons, graphics, contact buttons or buttons for mouse-over effects. The elements do not even have to be actually clicked. Thus, a single visitor clicking through a page with many graphical elements can easily generate 100 hits. As a rule of thumb: The number of hits generated by a call to a website is equal to the number of elements implemented on the website.
Navigation through the website
While a visit to the main page thus generates several hits at once, clicking on a subpage generates only one additional hit, since elements such as CSS or main navigation are created centrally for all pages of a website. On private websites, these hits are often publicly documented with a visitor counter. Via a pixel counter or a server-based script, each page view is counted as a hit. This often creates the impression that the page is heavily frequented, as the display values rapidly increase due to numerous hits per visit.
Hit evaluation – the analysis of the access numbers
Hit stands for “Hyperlink Induced Topic Search” and is part of the website analysis. As already mentioned, however, little or no conclusions can be drawn from the hits about the number of real and unique page visitors. Within analysis tools, log files and statistics, the hit values are mostly used to provide information about the need for optimization of a page. For example, it is possible to determine how the total traffic on a website develops over time or within certain time periods. In addition to hits, modern statistics tools usually also list the actual number of visitors, the so-called “visits”. These values actually provide information about the development of visitors to the website.
