The real truth about web traffic

Web traffic results often sound too good to be true, and that is generally because they are.
Many marketers will promote the number of ‘hits’ they receive as though this is the number of people that came to the site. This is not the case. Last Monday 20th August we had 301 visit our web site but 12,699 ‘hits’. That is an average of 42 ‘hits’ per person. A ‘hit’, according to Google, counts the number of files (or graphics) retrieved from each web page when a visitor looks at it. So for our Home Page at villages.com.au a visitor will be counted for 12 hits because they will view 12 (image) files on that page.
The three important measures of the strength of a web site are number of distinct visits, average visit length and average page views per visit. We had on Monday 20th 301 visits, an average time of 6 minutes 15 seconds and an average of 7.46 page views.