Internet Marketing for Small Business > Impression

Unique Impression, Hits and Page Views.
Benchmarking your website is the key to properly target any Internet Marketing campaign online.

Even among some experienced webmasters, I have seen confusion over the difference between a Impression, Page Views and a Hit. Many of us who have been around for awhile take this for granted but I feel its important to clarify for someone who is just starting out in internet marketing, regardless of which field you plan on focusing on.. be it search engine optimization, search engine placement (ppc advertising), or other forms of Internet Marketing.

So what's the deal with Impressions, Page Views and Hits?

A Unique Impression

Just as it sounds, an impression is a unique visitor to your website. Most Unique Impressions are benchmarked in a 24 hour period. Thus if someone visits your website 10 times during one 24 hour period they are only counted as 1-Unique Impression. If they visit your site again after say 36 hours, they would count as a new impression.

Unique impressions are a better guage of new traffic to your website.

Page View

A page view shows you how many visitors have looked at a specific page. Page Views count every time the page is loaded, no matter who is visiting the page. If visitor A, visits your homepage 20 times over 30 minutes, you'll see 20 page views.

A Hit - The not so accurate benchmark

Once upon a time it was all about getting hits on your webpage. Infact as someone who is clearly interested in learning about Intenet Marketing, you may have run across many dated articles that talk about getting more hits.

The truth is that Hits alone are not an accurate guage of your websites traffic or popularity.

Anytime a file on your webserver is loaded by a visitors browser it counts as a "hit". For instance their are six graphics on this particular page that are also shown on every other page on the website. Each time you visit another page on this website, a "hit" is tallied on the page itself, as well as each graphic, css file, script files, etc.

If I were to guage your visit just by Hits as a metric of traffic, I would wrongly assume that I had 9 visitors, when in reality it was you.

Talk about hits only when you want to talk to someone who knows absolutely nothing about internet technology. I had 5 million hits on my website this month! Sounds great, but to anyone in the know it will be unimpressive.