It used to be com­mon to track web site ‘hits’. But this is not a valu­able met­ric, and rely­ing on it could lead you astray. In this art­icle we’ll explain the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and visits.

Hits explained

A web page is made up of lots of dif­fer­ent pieces. When you watch a page load — espe­cially on a slow con­nec­tion — you’ll often be able to see this quite clearly. The page builds bit by bit: first the struc­ture, then text, then other ele­ments. Large images often take longer to load than the rest.

Each piece of the site is a sep­ar­ate file, and every request to each file gen­er­ates a new ‘hit’ on the web server. Load­ing a single page could gen­er­ate any­where from 1 to 50 (or more) hits.

Pageviews

A pageview is a much more use­ful met­ric. As the name sug­gests, it tracks the num­ber of times a page is viewed.

If your site works well, you will find users vis­it­ing mul­tiple pages. This is why, although valu­able, a pageview met­ric is not a true indic­a­tion of your web site’s traffic. A high pageview count is great, but a high vis­itor count is even better.

Vis­its

A visit is the most use­ful met­ric of all. Each num­ber of vis­its tells you the num­ber of single people spend­ing time on your site in one sitting.

For example, let’s say I visit your web site in the morn­ing, and look at 5 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents one visit, five pageviews and a large num­ber of hits. But, unless I count how many images and other assets are on the page, I’m not going to be able to eas­ily estim­ate the num­ber of hits.

Later that day, I fire up my browser and return to your site, look­ing at 3 dif­fer­ent pages. This rep­res­ents a second visit, three more pageviews and again, a large num­ber of hits. My activ­ity on your site has gen­er­ated two vis­its, eight pageviews and a lot of hits.

Unique and return­ing visits

Vis­itor stat­ist­ics are split between unique vis­it­ors and return­ing visitors.

What is the dif­fer­ence? A unique vis­itor is one that has never been to your web site before. A return­ing vis­itor is someone who has come back to your site.

A high num­ber of unique vis­it­ors and a low num­ber of return­ing vis­it­ors may indic­ate that your web site’s con­tent is not enga­ging enough to keep bring­ing people back.

Con­versely, if your unique vis­it­ors’ rate is low, you might want to think about ways of bring­ing more people to your site.

The best vis­itor met­rics have high num­ber of both unique and return­ing vis­it­ors. That would tell you that you are not only draw­ing people in, but you are good at keep­ing them com­ing back.

Meas­ure it, improve it

It is good to keep an eye on each part of your web site stat­ist­ics. Whatever you can meas­ure, you can improve! Know­ing the dif­fer­ence between hits, pageviews and vis­its is the first step towards bet­ter under­stand­ing your web site visitors.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syn­dic­a­tion, but RSS feeds are often referred to as “news feeds” instead — they’re the same thing. This art­icle will help you come to grips with what news feeds are all about.

What is RSS?

Really Simple Syn­dic­a­tion (RSS) is a way of being noti­fied of new web site con­tent as soon as it’s avail­able. The beau­ti­ful thing about RSS is that it allows you to pull updated con­tent from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent sources, without hav­ing to visit each web site indi­vidu­ally. It’s a really effi­cient way to stay up to date with a large num­ber of sites.

How do I use it?

To sub­scribe to a feed, you need a feed reader. This could be a ded­ic­ated desktop pro­gram, a web-based applic­a­tion, or an add-on to another pro­gram such as your email cli­ent or web browser.

There is an over­whelm­ing num­ber of feed read­ers avail­able. To keep it simple, at least in the begin­ning, I’II recom­mend one of two: Microsoft Out­look or Google Reader.

Microsoft Out­look

If you use Microsoft Out­look 2007 or newer, there’s a handy feed reader built right in. If you’re the kind of per­son who spends a lot of your day in Out­look, it can be a very quick and easy way to read your feeds.

For instruc­tions on set­ting up RSS feeds in Out­look, go to this location.

Google Reader

Google Reader is a web-based applic­a­tion for read­ing RSS feeds. It has some great heavy-duty fea­tures, such as a facil­ity for shar­ing feed con­tent with your contacts.

If you need to access your feeds from a num­ber of dif­fer­ent com­puters, Google Reader is the ideal solu­tion. It’s also my per­sonal RSS reader of choice.

To start using Google Reader you need a Google account. Fur­ther inform­a­tion can be found here.

About the uni­ver­sal feed icon

There is a stand­ard icon that you can now see on many web sites that provide a news feed. It is used to identify feeds them­selves, and to identify how to sub­scribe to them.

You’ve prob­ably seen it before. It looks like this:

The icon became an industry stand­ard for identi­fy­ing RSS back in 2005, when Microsoft and Opera Soft­ware both announced they were adopt­ing it. It first appeared in Moz­illa Fire­Fox web browsers.

If you’re inter­ested in read­ing more about how the icon came to be used, visit the feed icon Wiki­pe­dia page.

Autodis­cov­ery makes find­ing feeds simple

If the site is set up prop­erly, your browser will tell you when there’s a RSS feed avail­able on a site by show­ing an icon (usu­ally the recog­nis­able orange feed icon). The sceen­shots below show where in some pop­u­lar cur­rent browsers:

All you have to do is click on the icon, and the feed will be added to your RSS reader.

No autodis­cov­ery? Add feeds manually

If you can’t see the feed icon in your browser’s tool­bar, then there might be an icon or link on the web page itself. Often all you need to do is click on the icon and you’ll find out how to sub­scribe to the feed.

In another art­icle, we’ll look at whether you should con­sider provid­ing an RSS feed for your site, and how you go about doing it.

This is the first in a series of art­icles that high­light some email news­let­ters that I read reg­u­larly. While I enjoy the news­let­ters’ con­tent, I also like to try to learn from them.

Ana­lys­ing news­let­ters you sub­scribe to is a great way of learn­ing how to get your mes­sage across. Look at the con­tent and format, and learn from the tech­niques other people use.

Today I’m look­ing at two high-profile envir­on­mental pro­tec­tion organ­isa­tions with vastly dif­fer­ent approaches to many of the same prob­lems: Green­peace and Sea Shepherd.

Both organ­isa­tions send reg­u­lar news­let­ters. They keep their sub­scribers informed about import­ant envir­on­mental issues that are left out of main­stream news.

The Green­peace and Sea Shep­herd news­let­ters include sim­ilar things. Such as:

• prom­in­ent appeals for donations
• high­lighted items for sale in their respect­ive online stores, as an import­ant fun­drais­ing avenue for each
• high impact visual design
• clever place­ment of ‘call to action’ messages.

The dif­fer­ence is the tone of the content.

Green­peace takes a more fac­tual, research-driven approach to its art­icles. Sea Shep­herd appeals to the emo­tions with per­sonal mes­sages from its high pro­file head, Cpt. Paul Watson.

Both news­let­ters are very effect­ive, but for dif­fer­ent reasons.

Now look at your news­let­ter. Which style fits your product or ser­vice and news­let­ter audience?

Sign up to Greenpeace’s email news­let­ter
Sign up to Sea Shepherd’s email newsletter

If you read my post last week about Kay and Dave’s European adven­ture, you might note that we’re not here right now. In fact, if you’re read­ing this on the 2nd of August, right now we’re in Ham­burg, Ger­many. Guten Tag!

Don’t worry though — I’m not work­ing on this site while we’re away. Neither is this post one of our staff mem­bers pre­tend­ing to be me. They’re far too busy keep­ing up with Star­fish work! This post is brought to you by the minor mir­acle of WordPress’s sched­uled posting.

Lead­ing up to our depar­ture, I fin­ished off sites and tasks that needed my per­sonal atten­tion, and made last-minute travel arrange­ments. But I was also wrote and planned news posts and art­icles. I sched­uled these to appear every week­day morning.

It took quite an effort — five weeks of week-day posts adds up — but I think the effort was worth it. And of course, I did have the help of Leti­cia, who helps with our copy­writ­ing and edits almost everything that is pub­lished here.

If I hadn’t revealed my secret, vis­it­ors would have assumed I was at my desk turn­ing out art­icles each day, not gal­li­vant­ing around Europe. While I enjoy myself, these reg­u­lar instal­ments of fresh, new con­tent brings Clever Star­fish new vis­it­ors from Google and other sources.

So that’s my secret. You can take advant­age of sched­uled post­ing too — and you don’t even have to be in another country.

In the past few weeks, three of our pho­to­grapher cli­ents have launched some big com­pet­i­tions. So we thought we’d give ‘em a hand and let you all know about them too.

Chris­tian Fletcher has a com­pet­i­tion open to non-professional, enthu­si­ast pho­to­graph­ers. And you have to shoot land­scapes. It’s an unusual com­pet­i­tion, in that only 500 entries are allowed. You can enter as many times as you like, but as soon as the 500 limit has been reached, that is it! For more inform­a­tion hit up his web site here, here for more details, and here for inform­a­tion on one of the awe­some prizes.

Animal art pho­to­graph­ers Zoo Stu­dio have been nom­in­ated for the 4th Annual Paws and Claws Award. To cel­eb­rate, they are run­ning their own com­pet­i­tion. For every per­son who votes for Zoo Stu­dio, given it’s a people’s choice award, an entry goes into their own com­pet­i­tion. And what can you win? A huge Canon EOS 1000D and some private train­ing. Wow!

Finally, Alex Cearns, also an animal pho­to­grapher, is run­ning a com­pet­i­tion on her Face­book page. All you have to do is email in a photo of a pet, taken by you. The prize is really cool too: a metal­lic print of one of Alex’s multi-award-winning pho­to­graphs. For more details, visit her site and have a read.

We love it when we see our cli­ents enga­ging with their audi­ences like this. The only thing we won­der, is whether any of the Star­fish­ies are eli­gible to enter…