We had a Denver-based client call us the other day to tell us how very excited they were because they got 500 “hits” on their new catalog page. We gently told them that while that was great, unfortunately, hits are almost meaningless when it comes to measuring your audience or your site’s Inbound Marketing performance.
That’s because a simple way to define a “hit” is any one file downloaded from your Website, any one time. Every image, script, and stylesheet linked to a page counts as one file, and, as a result, one hit. Since a page can contain 1 file or 1,000 files, hits don’t tell you much from a marketing viewpoint.
Look at the image above which shows a single Web page. That page, though, holds dozens of images. If you do some quick math, you can see that a single view of that page would generate over 50 hits. If only ten people visit that page, that would be 500 hits. (Wow!)
For a lot of other reasons, tracking “hits” is important (server load, speed-of-page load, etc.) but not from an inbound marketing perspective.
The best true measures of your inbound marketing progress are going to be the following:
- Sessions (or visits): A session is any one person visiting your Web site any one time. If I visit your site ten times in a week, my visits count as ten sessions, whether I stayed on your site for 1 minute or 50.
- Unique visitors: A unique visitor is any one person visiting your Web site any number of times during a specific period. If I visit your site ten times in a week, I still count as only one unique visitor.
- Page views: A pageview is any one visitor viewing one page of your site, one time. A page must have a unique address, or URL. If I visit your homepage but then click a link and visit contactus.html, those are two pageviews.
- Time on site: This is the total amount of time one visitor spends on your site in the course of a single session. Average time on site is a very important measure of visit quality and interest.
- Referrers: If you click a link on a Google results page and land on your site, then Google is the referrer.
Any traffic-reporting toolset you use must provide these five metrics. If yours doesn’t, it’s time to get a new toolset.
There are other important measures you need to keep an eye on as well (back links, etc.) and we’ll talk about those on a later post, but these 5 are the Big 5.
Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.
You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com
