Amazingly, some sites still tout 'hits' as the main metric on judging their site's marketing performance. In response, the industry is trying to standardize the terms and the specific metrics by which we measure web traffic:
Since the Internet bust, industry leaders have been trying to clean up the messy spots. One project finalized this past year, for example, pushed to create new standards for counting advertisements as they are delivered to a page. In that instance, the Web publishing industry reached consensus on counting ad "impressions" as when the visitor has the opportunity to see the ad on the page, or when the graphic is fully loaded on the page, as opposed to when the graphic is merely sent from an ad server. Some top sites are still changing their pages to meet the standard.
But what constitutes a unique visitor? Even this is something not universally agreed upon:
The project is to develop common methods for how to count the number of unique visitors to a site. Before that can be accomplished, he said, the task force must devise rules for what counts as a page view--can it be counted twice or only once for content partners?--and how digital tags known as "cookies" play into it.
I look forward to industry standards that will ease the work for those involved in web marketing.
Read full article at CNET News.com