I like the idea of knowing where people are when they read the stuff I write on this little blog.I'm fascinated by the diverse range of places on the planet that show up on the cute little map on the right hand side.
I do wonder sometimes if this "content" has relevance for people say in Norway, Turkey or China for example. But then I remember that blogs are just another way of saying something and it doesn't have to make enormous sense or have great relevance. It's just someone saying something in their own way.
Anyway, I was at a business meeting on Monday evening. I arrived late, very late, due entirely to the rush-hour traffic in Dublin on a typical weekday.
One of the people at the meeting was talking about a website that she was responsible for and she said that she had been looking at the web statistics and they weren't positive. The site in her own words was getting very few hits.
When she said that it struck me that hardly anyone talks about hits anymore. It really doesn't mean anything nowadays.
There was a lot of work done in recent times to shift the thinking of advertisers away from simple hits and clicks language, to something more meaningful. It transpires that simple click statistics can be very difficult to interpret, making it hard to know what it really means when a website experiences a large number of hits or clicks.
Thus there is a move now to something more meaningful, often called web analytics. The idea is to derive a more meaningful interpretation from the data recorded so that the raw data is not what is used to make decisions, but rather what the data actually means.
Business Week magazine had a recent exposé on the phenomenon of click fraud. They focused on online advertising specifically but surely the theme can be extended to any other situation where clicks lead to rewards.
I'm not sure that hits mean anything per se. It's nice to see people (or computers more precisely) are visiting your page but you really can't read any more into it than that.
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