HITS are not a business metric. HITS are a server metric that vary greatly in scale in quantity from one site to the next and one page to the next. And yet the vast majority of companies who refer to their website or intranet in the same breath as ‘success’ most often trot out how many HITS they get.
“And last month the intranet got 100,000 HITS!” Big frigging deal.
Equating HITS to website or intranet success is the equivalent to a car dealership trumpeting their success in selling wiper blades and fuzzy dice instead of actual cars. (No disrespect intended to dice fans or other favorites such as the dashboard plastic Jesus or if you prefer Mohammend (hold the Danish cartoon jokes) or even Puff Daddy… or Diddy or whatever.
For those of you who have been around the web for more than a year or two, you have no excuse for continuing to equate success to number of HITS. Stop embarrassing yourself. If you really are new to the web or intranet then you’re forgiven and I’m happy to explain further (I apologize for the rant that is not intended for new web managers but intended for veterans who dam well know better or are completely incompetent or they just really like fuzzy dice).
HITS do not equal visitors. HITS do not equal page views. They never did so stop leaning on this over-used, over-hyped statistic. Amazon.com has dozens of HITS per page (look at their mess of a home page). Twenty visitors to Amazon.com could register thousands of hits. To confuse matters more, each page can have a different number of hits depending on the number of pictures, etc. You therefore don’t have to be a rocket scientist to conclude that thousands do not make a business metric of value. A few visitors does not make a success.
In fact, the only time as a consultant I refer to HITS on behalf of a client site is when I’m forced to because they have other client sites that track HITS because all the other sites do. For example, one client site gets about 200,000 visitors per month. Well, when every other site of the clients promotes how many millions of hits they get per month then 200,000 sounds trivial to the uninformed masses. Isn’t the client always right? Sort of…. sometimes.
Here are some business intranet metrics that matter:
- unique visitors
- page views
- cost per visitor
- cost per page view
- ROI per unique visitor
- user satisfaction
For you old hacks… I know I’m preaching to the converted, but I also know you share the same sentiments and frustration as I. For those that are new to this, I’ll provide more detail on the how to measure for success in the next Intranet Blog installment. Stay tuned…
In the meantime, ditch the idiots and thire HITS, and pick up some intelligent metrics.
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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media