Hit

A hit is a delivery of a single file from the publishing server to the user. This file may be an html page, an image, cascading style sheet (CSS), javascript file, etc. There is a misunderstanding that a hit represents a visitor, where it does not. A single visit to a page with 50 images, CSS file and an Adobe Flash animation would be counted in the server logs as 53 (fifty three!) hits. Furthermore, requests by search engine and other spiders (or crawlers) may inflate hit count tremendously, rendering hit-based data quite useless. Basing traffic and marketing analysis on this metric is strongly not recommended. For this reason, virtually all enterprise class web analytics solutions do not report hit-based data. Instead of using hits as a basis for marketing analysis, rely on more stable metrics, such as visits or pageviews in most applications.