NONE: Re: visits vs. hits
Re: visits vs. hits
'liz. miller (ecm_at_oneweb.com)
Tue, 23 Jul 1996 09:25:20 -0400
At 09:27 PM 7/22/96 -0500, Online Advertising Discussion List wrote:
>Date: Mon, 22 Jul 1996 13:05:07 -0400
>From: mccoy_at_mail.voyagerco.com (Wilkie McCoy)
>Subject: visits vs. hits
>
>Does anyone know of a "quick and dirty" method to calculate a general
>figure for the number of visits to a site based on the number of hits? Is
>there a simple percentage I can use since I have no time for fancy
>algorithms and cannot afford expensive software.
>
>Any advice would be appreciated.
>
>Wilkie McCoy
>mccoy_at_voyagerco.com
>www.voyagerco.com
>
If you have a counter such as wwwcount installed on your top page, the
counter is a general indicator of the number of visitors to the page as the
counter is smart enough to be cached.
If you have access to your access statistics and you're on a unix box, a
rough-cut count would be to do the following:
grep /mypage.html /usr/local/httpd/logs/access_log | grep "\" 200 " | wc
which will count all the accesses to mypage.html (given that mypage.html is
at the root level of the web site; you might have to add more path there)
from the log file (which may or may not be at /usr/local/httpd/logs), then
searches for the string '" 200 ' which is the code for a "fresh" load (not
retrieved from cache), then counts the number of "grepped" lines. The 1st
number returned is the number of visits during the course of the log file,
allowing you to say something like:
Since January 23, 1994 there have been 100,348,843 visitors to this
site.
I have written a perl script to process log information weekly in a much
more complex way for my customers -- this is *very valuable* information,
particularly when you can look at which pages on your site are the most
popular. I have customers whose on-line business is radically different
from what it was originally intended to be because they paid attention to
their access statistics. They thought it would be A while instead it was D
-- altering their web site to either focus on A (if they really wanted A to
be their business) or highlighting D even more effectively (if they wanted D
to be their business) has translated into a successful web site.
For a lengthy discussion of hits vs. visits, please visit my site and read:
http://www.oneweb.com/maxm/hits.html
<soapbox>
If we would all learn to concentrate on visitors to our sites rather than
overblown hits, we would be more credible to our customers. Saying you have
1,000 visitors a day when you really have 100 visitors a day is not only
misleading, it raises false expectations and leads to extremely unhappy
customers. 100 visitors a day to a site is (in my humble opinion) nothing
to sneeze at for many sites ... I have customers who are thrilled to have 3
visitors a day because of their specialty. Yes, search engines and computer
freebie sites will get zillions of visitors, but if you're selling kitty
litter boxes and you get 30 interested customers a month then that's a great
deal!
An even better deal if they buy the things!
</soapbox>
-- 'liz.
elizabeth c. miller ecm_at_oneweb.com
Effective Internet Marketing
maxm consulting
508 362-5886 http://www.oneweb.com/maxm/
