Subject: Re: Hit Conversion Factor From: CIIR@aol.com Date: Tue, 19 Sep 1995 19:46:16 -0400

On Sept 18 Bruce Siceloff wrote, in part:

>Surely the ratio of hits to actual users varies widely from one website 
>to another.  Some sites will have users who do lots of repeat visits and 
>who hit lots of pages during a single visit.  Others will have fewer of 
>these, and will have more users who account for fewer hits apiece.

>Inter@ctive Age had a story about this published I think in June. You can 
>find it at http://techweb.cmp.com/techweb/ia/features/hitstory.html.  It 
>accompanies a list of busy web sites with the number of hits each one 
>reported during a week in May and the corresponding estimate or guess 
>(provided I think by the respective web site, not computed by I. Age) as 
>to how many unique users accounted for those hits.

>You'll see there was considerable variation in these ratios. 10:1 for 
>Netscape, 3.4:1 for Pathfinder, 4.1:1 for Playboy, 7:1 for HotWired, 
>14.8:1 for NandO.net, 2.86:1 for Penthouse.  And were any of these ratios 
>accurate?   


>  BRUCE SICELOFF              New Media Editor, The News & Observer.

I've been getting quite an education in this, as CIIR competes a study of
measuring Web usage.

Bruce is correct: translating hits to number of visits to a "page" varies,
based on the dsicrete number of elements on that page. If there are five
graphics plus text, then one client looking at one page generates six "hits."
Thus, for that page, a 6:1 ratio is the factor. Other pages from the same
provider may be more or less element intensive. Complicating matters further
is caching by the online services' browsers and by others as well. 

A Web site that wants to provide good figures for advertisers would at the
least have to come up with a good average for their site. Even better would
be a conversion based on a weighted calculation of actual pages accessed
times the number of elements on those pages.

Of course, none of this tells you anything about the eyes on the other side
of the screen looking art the pages or their motivation for clicking on them.

I will post some of the basic findings from the study here after it is
published (by Find/SVP), hopefully in November.

Ben Compaine
Chairman, Center for Infomation Industry Research
Temple University

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