Using the word ‘hit’ synonymously with traffic can paint an exaggerated picture, leaving business people confused about the actual return on their website [or blogsite] investment. Site metrics and business metrics can be very different sets of data and unless those metrics solely reflect human visitation, they will actually confuse the value proposition for a site owner.

Consider questioning a site provider if they report ‘no. of hits’ because when ’hits’ include non- human bot visitation AND/ OR the multiple files [often dozens] downloaded for a single web-page view, the nos. won’t reflect an actual return on investment. In the latter case, each file gets counted as a hit when a page is downloaded making the number of hits more reflective of complex website pages than actual traffic. In the first scenario, bot [crawler or spider] traffic is typically a lot more than, if not the majority of, total visitor traffic.

It’s worth adding that Google Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. bot [crawler or spider] visitation is very important to a website or Blog owner. For those not familiar, the Google bot is software deployed to collect documents from the web in order to build a search-able index for their search engine. So not all bots are bad and without a visit from the Google bot one cannot be indexed or show up in a Google search result. However, there are millions of other bots that continuously crawl the web, many with ill- intent.

Kinetic Knowledge offers VisiStat, which not only offers rich business metric data  and solely based upon human traffic, but an undeniably layperson- friendly dashboard. In summary, only humans purchase products & services: websites and blogs are marketing solutions and folks should have true business metrics so they can actually evaluate a return on their investment of time, effort & money

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