HITS: How Idiots Track Success
Remember the good old days when the first response to your statement of having an actual website was the question – how many hits do you get? Unfortunately many business managers are still obsessed with that hits metric from the server and it seems like the main reason is because it’s the largest number they can put onto a table at any given meeting of stakeholders. As Jim Sterne articulates – HITS: How Idiots Track Success. We need to be asking that next question.
First, a hit is just a resource being accessed from the server like an image or a web markup file or a JavaScript file. That should obviously tell you that all pages aren’t the same and with the number of resources called into some pages the hits metric gets quickly reduced to garble. Hits are like judging the smell of a person on the basis of how many items are in their pocket. Mostly unrelated.
So how do you test for success on your website? That depends on your reason for having a website and what it’s there to achieve for you. At the very beginning of a web project your business goals and objectives should be considered before even a line of code is written. You should clearly state what you intend to achieve, and how you intend to measure success or failure. Is your site there to promote an increase in sales? If so, over what time period? And how do you define enough success from abject waste of your investment? Because, seriously, if you’re just in the mood to waste thousands of dollars on a website as wallpaper you have run into the main business problem of web development – it needs to have a reason, and it needs to have a return on investment. Or you don’t need a website.
In some instances you might be happy with bums on seats so page views and unique visitors could, and I only say could, be a valid measurement for success. But it would be a shallow goal, at best. With dynamic IP addresses unique visitors might not be unique, or they might have visited by accident and never return. On that point I should say a shop with a thousand customers and only one buyer will never be as successful as a shop with twenty customers and five buyers. So be careful how you place importance on that metric, too. How many page views are from accidental visitors? How many visitors leave within seconds of arrival? What you should be concerned with is whether or not you meet your business case – for example, if you are a shop it’s more likely to be the conversion rate, what you sold and customer satisfaction. If you are a struggling Not for Profit organisation you may be satisfied with increased exposure but it could also include a receipt of donations and support.
Ultimately your business website is about making money and meeting business criteria no matter what your current web manager tells you about hits. Hits don’t make you money. Page views don’t even necessarily make you money. As a business owner you need to be able to justify that Return on Investment and every web conversation needs to start coming back to that root cause for the site’s existence.
Hits are a mumbo jumbo large number way for managers to impress other managers. It’s how idiots track success.
