Making Sense of Internet Lingo (or How to Sound Cool)

InsuranceJournal.com reports: The week of July 9th showed our highest weekly numbers:

Hits 317,459
User sessions 7,142 (up from 5,496)
Unique users 2,586 (up from 2,087)
Page views 28,449 (up from 22,268)

Yeah, yeah, yeah…but what does this all really mean?

Let’s back up. So there I was, after having worked umpteen years in advertising, thinking I knew a lot. Boy, was I surprised when I found myself employed at one of those hip start-up Internet companies. Advertising in the Internet world was not what I had known advertising to be.

Besides the fact that I had to pack up all of my conservative clothes for fear of not fitting in, there were a whole bunch of new terms being thrown around, and if I wanted to succeed, I had to learn them quickly.

So my purpose here is to guide you through that mysterious world of Internet Lingo. That way if you ever come face-to-face with one of those techy looking computer geeks who are worth millions, you can sound like you too are in the know!

Hits are always going to be the largest number quoted, but they are also the most misleading. After last year’s Super Bowl, one advertiser reported millions and millions of hits only to announce a few months later that the advertising didn’t work.

Hits are defined as each time a file is requested by a server. In other words, if your home page has eight graphics on it and you open your site, then you would get nine hits (one extra hit for the text). Ten people going to your site would result in 90 hits. Hits do not reflect actual people going to the site. Hits are often bragged about, but companies should not regard this number too seriously. (Use this with your relatives, not with those millionaire geeks.)

Unique users, visits or visitors are key. They are defined as actual “eyeballs,” a.k.a. people coming to your website.

User sessions let you know how many times people are coming to your site within a certain period of time.

Page views or impressions, other popular website terms, are equivalent to what the visitors actually looked at once they got there. Good numbers here means more people going to more pages!

So let’s make an everyday comparison: you see an ad from your local grocer with lots of things on sale (that means lots of hits). You go to that store to shop (that’s a visit). You look at all of the sale items (that’s an impression). You purchase the products…well, that’s a sale in any scenario!

And since a sale is the ultimate goal, you should be asking your webmaster and internal Internet gurus, “how many people are actually coming to our site?”

Find out the hits as well, because there are still those that will be impressed by them, and they are generally indicative of a good site. And, how many unique visitors does your site have? Which pages are of most interest? What are the demographics of your visitors?

Then arm yourself with this information and use it to generate leads, reach new markets or just to sound cool at your next client meeting or company party.