Hits vs Page Views vs Unique Visitors

What is your ratio?

[Rollo]

I was just curious what your ratio of hits page views to unique visitors ratio is? Which do you think best reflects revenue?

I feel strongly that page views is the best measure, however in the mainstream media, it seems hits are inexplicably still passed of as the end all be all (and generally confused with both unique visitors and page views).

[freeflight2]

# of unique visitors is the most important factor in terms of monetizing a site.

Some of my sites generate 100 pageviews per unique user per month (community, forum etc.) and generating just a little bit more per user as some others with 2.5 - 4 pvs per unique.

Even if advertisers/networks offer 'CPM deals' they usually pay per unique users.

[stapel]

I have an academic site. Most users are coming from a search engine and going directly to the page covering their topic of interest, or are coming from their instructors' sites by clicking the topic-specific link. So I don't generally get a whole lot of "roaming" across my site.

For this month, through the 12th, I have had:

Hits: 3779943
Page Views: 472295
Sessions: 155627

(I don't use any sort of visitor tracking, so I use the session count as a proxy for "unique visitors".)

Reviewing the numbers, I have been getting about 12,000 visitors a day, with each visitor viewing about three pages, and each page containing an average of seven images.

I have no revenue stream (advertising, etc), but I do know that "hits" (file calls) are irrelevant when it comes to selling ads. Your "value" as an outlet would likely depend much more on the average number of visitors and/or the average number of page views, as this is more likely to relate to the number of times the vendor's ad will be seen.

Eliz.

[Rollo]

I agree that unique visitors are a good measure as well, however in my case anyway I can get a lot of unique visitors for whom our conent is not what they were looking for. Page views seem to vary closely with sales in my case. This generally means that there was a higher degree of interest and this translates to sales.

I'd think unique vistors would be a better reflection of revenues for Adwords and other pay per click sites.

Hits are pretty much usless, does anyone see any value in knowing how many hits you got? Nothing comes to mind for me.

[J2Park]

What are you trying to determine? If you are trying to reflect revenue, then revenue best reflects revenue :-) There is not really a standard to compare visitors to revenue as every site and industry is different. If you are trying to develop some sort of performance indicator to monitor then the ratio of visitors to paying customers is a pretty good one.

If I understand you correctly, a small protion of your visitors account for most of the page views? You may want to review how the other people are finding your site (to review your marketing), why they are not interested in your site (to determine if you can push what they want to them). If you have alot of people coming to your site and they are leaving because they are not finding what they are looking for, send them my way and I will create a site for whatever they are looking for :-)

Hits are only useful for system administrators and are not usefull for marketing.