'Hits' miss the mark

Howard Lake | 10 July 2002 | News

Don’t fall for ill-informed Web sites that encourage charities to part with their cash.

We’ve just received yet another e-mail message encouraging charities to sign up to another charity information site, and to pay for the privilege. This one told us that their site had already had several thousand “hits.”

Many charity Web managers will already know that this term is spurious. A “hit” is simply a request for a file on a Web site. This file could be a Web page, a graphic, a Javascript, a Flash file or almost any other type of file. So, one visit to just the front page of UK Fundraising notches up around 20 hits: each graphic and script on this page is included as a hit. Yet only one page has been viewed.

Would you be impressed if we told you that UK Fundraising had received 4.5 million hits in the first six months of this year? We hope you wouldn’t. What you should really ask is how many pages were viewed on the site, how many unique visitors used the site, how many user sessions occurred on the site, how many registered users we have, and so on.

So, next time you hear someone crowing about the number of hits their Web site gets, smile and delete their e-mail message.

About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale. He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.