I received an email today from Alan, a client of mine asking for my advise. It was with regard to an advertising opportunity within an online directory that he was considering.
The directory had offered a brief trail period and had created his company’s profile on their website a few days earlier. Now they had snapshot analytic report on the exposure. It was reported that my client’s profile was very busy, because it had registered nearly 5000 hits in just a few days.
Alan, being the shrewd gent that he is, was quick to extrapolate the numbers and work out his potential exposure for the year. It obviously sounded good value or he would have dismissed it without seeking my opinion but it’s a good job that he did before proceeding.
You see Alan, doesn’t care much for techno-jargon. He prefers to have things explained in a straight forward way that he can relate to and so not knowing his “hits” from his “cron jobs” he made the perfectly natural assumption that he had been presented with statistics about the number of people who have viewed his profile. As I was able to point out this was not the case.
For those who don’t know, each time a file is called from the server it registers as a hit, but a hit is not a UPI (Unique Page Impression)
When you load a webpage a plethora of files of various types are called from the host server. In fact, if you’ve just landed on this page by clicking a link in a search engine, and assuming this is the first time you’ve visited this domain, then you’ve just increased my hit count by over 150 hits but you are just one person who views a page once or, 1 UPI.