WHY do people try to sell their traffic products based on "Hits"?

[Preben Frenning]

Seriously, I've seen this SO MANY times!

A "hit" can NEVER turn into a sale, it can never click your adsense, it can never sign up to your list, it can never comment on your blog, it can never fill out your cpa offers, and it will never send you an email.

Whatever they're telling you, it's not the hits you want, it's unique quality visitors.

I see this way too often, and whenever I see it, I usually leave the salespage immediately. Simply because I hate it when people are trying to take advantage of newbies. "Wow! 500 hits A DAY?!?" - And 24 visitors...

Now, I'm not 100% sure exactly what a "hit" is, (In IM it's not killing someone at least!)but I know it's not a visitor.

Am I completely wrong with this, or what am I missing?

- Preben

[mlongley]

Originally Posted by Preben Frenning

Seriously, I've seen this SO MANY times!

A "hit" can NEVER turn into a sale, it can never click your adsense, it can never sign up to your list, it can never comment on your blog, it can never fill out your cpa offers, and it will never send you an email.

Whatever they're telling you, it's not the hits you want, it's unique quality visitors.

I see this way too often, and whenever I see it, I usually leave the salespage immediately. Simply because I hate it when people are trying to take advantage of newbies. "Wow! 500 hits A DAY?!?" - And 24 visitors...

Now, I'm not 100% sure exactly what a "hit" is, (In IM it's not killing someone at least!)but I know it's not a visitor.

Am I completely wrong with this, or what am I missing?

- Preben

A "hit" is not a visitor to a web site, but rather a hit on the web server. A web server hit could be a graphic, html, javascript, etc... So if you have a lot of graphics, on your site, you can get a lot more hits than someone with a simple page. Unique visitors is a much better metric to measure, but at the end of the day, it is still conversions that should do the talking.

[Preben Frenning]

Exactly my point! But many people who's selling "Traffic guides" use screenshots of how many "hits" they have been able to get, and use it as a selling point, while in reality, they know extremely well that the hits doesn't matter.

Like I said, a hit won't do you anything good, and it won't make you money.

Geez, if it was the "hits" that made the bucks, I'll just go all crazy at pinging and get rich in a day! (I get loads of hits from googlebot)

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Originally Posted by mlongley

A "hit" is not a visitor to a web site, but rather a hit on the web server. A web server hit could be a graphic, html, javascript, etc... So if you have a lot of graphics, on your site, you can get a lot more hits than someone with a simple page. Unique visitors is a much better metric to measure, but at the end of the day, it is still conversions that should do the talking.

Very true.

For example, if you have a web page with 9 graphics, you'll have ten hits when someone visits that page: one for the page itself and one for each of the graphics. If they reload the page, you might get one or nine more hits, depending on whether the browser caches the graphics, which it probably would.

Assuming, though, that each visitor looks at the page only once, 100 hits would only be 10 visitors. If they all look at the page twice, you might have, say, 110 hits, which would show up as 20 visitors. But, that would only be 10 unique visitors.

Conversions alone aren't enough. They have to be factored in with the number of unique visitors. If you get 1000 unique visitors, and 50 made a purchase, you have a 5% conversion rate. But, if you had 500 unique visitors and 40 made a purchase, you'd have an 8% conversion rate.

Which would you prefer?

You might say you'd rather have those 50 purchases than the 40, but that 8% conversion rate is better than 5%, so you'll end up making more money with fewer visitors, which means the more targeted visitors you can drive to your site, the better off you will be, in both terms of cost and return.

[Steven Carl Kelly]

mlongley described it correctly. Hits are essentially useless for any sort of meaningful judge of a site's traffic. If I wanted, I could have one page with 1,000 tiny transparent one pixel images on it and collect 1,000 "hits" every time a person loaded the page.

Show me "uniques" and not "hits".

[Raydal]

You have to sell to the understanding of your prospects.
If people like their fruit juices thick, then you show how
thick yours is even though it may not have anything to
do with nutritional value.

I don't think people set out to deceive anyone when they
use 'hits' because in a way your 'hits' will be proportional
to your unique visitors. You may have a ton of hits and
a few visitors but not the other way around.

Rather than explaining the difference you use 'hits'.

-Ray Edwards

[Eric Lorence]

For the same reason Page Rank, and Alexa rank is used to sell products, services, and websites... Boatloads of misinformation as to how important these stats really are.

Kind of like the "first page of Google" routine, then going on to dazzle you with how the got "Schnicklefritz" on the first page in a few hours...

OK.. so how does that make money?

BTW, "Page views" is a better stat for anyone wondering, then "unique visits", the "Country of Origin"... and sales.

"Hits" are just requests to the server, and usually come from anywhere or anything, like spiders.
More technical then anything important. So if you host an image on your server- such as an avatar, every time the page with your avatar is called- anywhere, it will be a "hit" on your server.

[hipnol]

nice points made. they even send number of bots to record hits which makes no use for webmasters.

One more crazy phrase used is "targeted visitor" - I wonder why people use it in such a lame way, they call every visitor as a targeted visitor. To be frank most of the social sites send stupid useless visitors and few ppl are crazy about that and call targeted visit :lol:

[Dan C. Rinnert]

Originally Posted by Eric Lorence

Kind of like the "first page of Google" routine, then going on to dazzle you with how the got "Schnicklefritz" on the first page in a few hours...

Prepare to be dazzled... Go to Google, type in pig pencil and pick the strangest suggestion that it makes. Hint: It's not pig pencil cases...

BTW, there's already competition for "Schnicklefritz."

[Jeremy Kelsall]

They are showing you how to get visitors to your website...you are buying strategies to get eyes on your offer. If you can't convert them, then you have other issues.

[Preben Frenning]

Originally Posted by Jeremy Kelsall

They are showing you how to get visitors to your website...you are buying strategies to get eyes on your offer. If you can't convert them, then you have other issues.

They are selling you in, showing off their CRAZY increase in hits just HOURS after they implemented their "supersecret" strategy. While they are trying to teach you how to get visitors in the product, they're still trying to sell you in on the hits, which they could've easily generated by adding houndreds of 1 pixel images to their site and pinged it like @Steven said.

[Jeremy Kelsall]

Originally Posted by Preben Frenning

They are selling you in, showing off their CRAZY increase in hits just HOURS after they implemented their "supersecret" strategy. While they are trying to teach you how to get visitors in the product, they're still trying to sell you in on the hits, which they could've easily generated by adding houndreds of 1 pixel images to their site and pinged it like @Steven said.

True, if you assume that every person selling a traffic system is a dishonest moron.

[Preben Frenning]

Well I don't. But I see it way too often.

The point of this post was really to tell people that hits doesn't matter.
And the people who try to do this most likely quite a few sales from more experienced marketers. At least they lose a lot of credibility in my eyes, when they are supposed to show "proof" of massive traffic, and it's really just a screenshot of their awstats hits.

[aboutalhah]

Simple: They do this to impress newbies who don't have a clue.

Franck