Become web savvy before advertising online

So you are ready to buy some web advertising for your business but are not sure what all the numbers and terms mean.

It can be confusing for shops used to purchasing print advertising.

If a magazine sells 5,000 copies, that is fairly easy to understand — but what is the difference between 5,000 website hits, 5,000 unique visitors and 5,000 page views? Which one is better?

Bridget Clammer, web development manager for emedia, said it is important advertisers know which term is being bandied about or you will end up comparing apples with oranges.

When the Internet first became popular in the 90s, many websites bragged about how many hits they had. It was the term du jour — but in many ways can be very inaccurate.

Bandwidth

Ms Clammer said hits are the most basic measurement possible but it is ­better used for measuring how much bandwidth a website is using rather than an ­accurate figure of how many people are going to it.

She added: “That’s how people used to measure it but most people are a little more savvy and they know that doesn’t mean much any more.”

She said someone could click on a page and that one click could generate dozens or even hundreds of hits depending on how many graphics are being used.

“The most useful term is unique visitors,” she added. This refers to one computer going to a website. That computer would count as a unique visitor.

Ms Clammer said: “Even that can be a little misleading because of internal networks.

“Within our office we have 10 computers but to the outside world all our computers have one IP ­address. emedia would be one unique visitor.”

This is opposed to the entire staff counting as 10 unique visitors.

Likewise, one person can generate several unique visitors by going to a website from their work and home computers as well as their mobile device.

Ms Clammer said that while not perfect, “this is definitely the best way to measure a website and to see how popular certain content is”.

Page views are another measurement tool and are exactly what they sound like — the number of views a website’s pages get. Ms Clammer said that, like hits, it could be manipulated by hitting refresh.

She added: “If you want to go a little deeper, another good item to look at is the time on the site. If the ­average time is about 30 seconds, it’s not very good.  It means they are barely getting to your home page then going away.”

For businesses that already have websites, a great tool is Google Analytics.

Ms Clammer said: “It’s free and so comprehensive I can’t think of anything you would need to know that they don’t tell you.

“It has the basics like hits, unique visitors and page views but it also has a section on traffic sources, telling us where people are coming from.” It is also useful to let businesses know what other websites are sending traffic their way.

Ms Clammer said the tool could be useful for people with an Internet presence.

She added: “It can let you know which content is popular. We wanted people to look at our portfolio but when we looked a while ago no one was ­going to it.

“We were not pushing it enough or it wasn’t easy enough to get around so we changed it and a lot more people are going to it.”

For more information call emedia on 236-2025 or log on to www.emedia.bm