Online traffic: Don’t say ‘hits’

Add comment July 8th, 2008

Most of us in the newsroom use the word, “hit,” when talking about traffic on a story, video, photo gallery, etc. But we don’t measure hits. We measure page views, among other things.

Last week I was talking to Kent Ecklor, our online director, about hits because I’ve had a tough time explaining the difference between a hit and a page view to newsroom staffers. Kent told me not to even try to explain the difference. Instead, he shared five things we do measure with explainers:

Daily Unique Visitors
Daily Unique Visitors are defined as a visitor’s first visit to your site in a day. While one person may visit your site and view the home page three times, a contact page twice, and several other pages once each, the Unique Visitors report records that person as one “unique visitor” for the time allotted. Note that if an individual visits your site from both home and work, he/she will be counted as two distinct visitors.

Weekly Unique Visitors
Weekly Unique Visitors are defined as a visitor’s first visit to your site in a week. While one person may visit your site and view the home page three times, a contact page twice, and several other pages once each, the Unique Visitors report records that person as one “unique visitor” for the time allotted. Note that if an individual visits your site from both home and work, he/she will be counted as two distinct visitors.

Monthly Unique Visitors
Monthly Unique Visitors are defined as a visitor’s first visit to your site that month. While one person may visit your site and view the home page three times, a contact page twice, and several other pages once each, the Unique Visitors report records that person as one “unique visitor” for the time allotted. Note that if an individual visits your site from both home and work, he/she will be counted as two distinct visitors.

Visits 
A visit is defined as a sequence of consecutive page views without a 30 minute break. A visit always contains one or more page views. A unique visitor always performs at least one, but possibly more, visits.

Page views
A page view is counted every time someone visiting your site loads a page in his or her browser. This includes pages that are loaded as a result of the reload and back buttons. Note that the times displayed are in whatever your site administrator configured as your “home” time zone.

Hope this helps you, too. And, if not, I found this really cool site called NetLingo. You can search any Web term.

click and clack, the animated version

1 comment July 8th, 2008

if you read our wheels section or listen to wnij on saturday mornings, you know and probably love ray and tom magliozzi, the car talk guys. they tackle your car problems with laughter at every turn.

i just found out that “click and clack, the tappet brothers” are getting an animated series on pbs. as says, they ARE an animated pair. check them out here. or read another article about “as the wrench turns” here.

tune in at 8 and 8:30 p.m. wednesday on wttw. doesn’t appear to be on wisconsin public television. i’ll have to watch the credits, for sure.