Frequently Used Terms in Internet Advertising

The Pennsylvania Visitors Network
We are taking this opportunity to explain some Internet Advertising terms that, with your on-line presence, you will begin to hear more frequently. We believe it is in your best interest to try to understand what they mean:

Let's suppose you have a three-fold brochure. It is made up of one piece of paper with ten paragraphs of text and three pictures.

Hits: This is the most frequently used term of web site developers and Internet users and is often the most misunderstood. Using the example of the brochure above, as soon as you put that brochure in my hands you would count me as 14 "hits". One hit would be for the piece of paper making up the entire brochure, ten hits would be one for each text paragraph and 3 hits would be one for each picture. People developing websites should know this. Ask them to explain it to you. It gets better (or worse, depending on how you look at it). As soon as I put that brochure down and pick it up again I become 14 more "hits". Your website is the same way. It is made up of one "piece of paper" (the web page itself) and all of the separate components that make it up. Every single computer file requested (including all of your graphics) are each one "hit". If your site is made up of 50 pictures and 5 pages each visitor is 55 "hits"...each and every time he/she looks at your site. What you need to ask people who are getting "70,000 hits a month" is "Are your beds full?" "Are your aisles packed?" "Did you sell out your tickets"? After all, 70,000 "hits a month" are almost 1,000,000 hits a year (70,000x12=840,000) and the people ought to be flocking to your business.

Page Views: Using the same brochure as above, if I am reporting "page views", as soon as you put that brochure in my hands I am 6 page views. Remember that it is a tri-fold folded so I have "six pages", three on one side, three on the other. Obviously not as misleading as "hits". But, as soon as I put that brochure down and pick it up again I am another 6 page views. If your website has 9 pages and I, as one person, look at all 9 pages I am 9 page views. If I come back tomorrow and look at it again I am nine more page views. Site developers know this too. A more common term is "impressions".

Unique Visitors: This is the best accounting method that the Internet has to offer at this stage. This is when you put the brochure in my hand and I am "one unique visitor" regardless of how many times I look at it. On your website home page your programmer puts in a code that is fed into the end viewer's computer as soon as he/she calls up your website. It doesn't matter how many pages are viewed or how frequently they are viewed. It doesn't matter how many computer files are requested when someone clicks on your link. The code is usually good for about a month. As long as it sits in the person's computer that person is counted once, and only once.

The Pennsylvania Visitors Network reports only "unique visitors" when we report numbers. We are business people just like you. We want the facts, the real data in order to make decisions. And we believe that is what you want too. We are not interested in impressing you with "hits". We are interested in helping you to increase your profits because that is what effective advertising is supposed to do. And if, after reading this, you still need to think in terms of hits, the Pennsylvania Visitors Network receives about 175,000 "hits" a DAY. Keep that in mind the next time someone calls you about the Internet and website marketing.
We are proud to say...


53,363,604 visitors and growing.
Pennsylvania Visitors Network
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