[thelist] hits vs sessions

[martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com]

Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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One thing to bear in mind about stats on current usage is that
it's a self-selecting sample. If you have a site which only really
works well on (say) IE5/Windows then that's going to be your
user base. It's not valid therefore to use that as the basis for
decisions about what to support in future.

If you do stuff like produce a Sherlock plugin (memo to
self: must do this for my own site), serve up stylesheets
dynamically which can enlarge fonts etc then you're going
to get more Mac users than if not.

What *is* more valid is thinking about who your audience is.
If your site has a similar audience to http://slashdot.org/ then
you would be *mad* to optimise it for Windows/IE. Similarly,
most hard core users of http://msdn.microsoft.com/ *are*
probably going to be Win/IE.

Cheers
Martin



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Subject:  RE: [thelist] hits vs sessions



In this case, where the author is trying to determine how what
percentage of visitors use certain browsers, hits are a perfectly
reasonable measurement.  Assuming that Netscape users and IE users
use a site in similar ways -- and there's no reason to think they
don't -- then they'll generate a comparable number of hits per
session.  Their respective percentages of hits are therefore the
same as they would for sessions.

That said, I completely disagree that Netscape 6 is irrelevant.
:)

-Colin

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
> [mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org]On Behalf Of Herzog, Ari
>
> I love when people talk about hits.
> It means nothing, really.
> It's the visitor sessions which speak volumes.



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