ASA Adjudication on Cool Diamonds.com Ltd

Ad

A national press ad, for a diamond dealership, stated “Europe’s largest on-line jewellers. With over 5 million hits each month this website has revolutionised the way we buy diamonds.”

Issue

H. Goldie & Company objected that the claim "over 5 million hits each month" misleadingly implied that more than five million people visited the website each month.

CAP Code

Response

Cool Diamonds said because the internet was such an important part of people's lives today, they believed readers who were interested in buying their product over the internet would know that a hit was a request for information rather than a unique visitor.  They said hits were relevant to their business because they reflected the interest generated by their website.

They highlighted a previous ASA adjudication in which a similar complaint had been not upheld.  Cool Diamonds said they hosted their servers themselves and kept a log of all the hits on those servers.  They said the log recorded information including the IP address which in some cases could identify the actual computer that an individual used to access the Cool Diamond website.  They said that because of data protection laws those logs were only kept for a few days to ensure that they kept that private information for the minimum amount of time needed.

Assessment

Upheld

The ASA noted Cool Diamonds kept a log of all the 'hits' to their website on their servers.  We noted they had used the 'hits' figure because they believed it was an accurate reflection of the interest generated by their website.  We acknowledged their point that a previous ASA adjudication had considered that the term 'hits' was unlikely to mislead readers.

We noted 'hits' referred to the number of items, such as files or images, retrieved from a website and that it was not equivalent to the number of pages viewed by a user or the number of visitors.  We noted the more files or images present on a certain webpage, the more 'hits' the website received, which meant that one visitor could generate a high number of hits.  We understood that 'hits' was not recognised as a measurement of website traffic by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK (JICWEBS); it only recognised measurements of unique users, page impressions or visits.  We also noted the Institute of Direct Marketing website stated "Hit - a highly contentious term that rarely indicates the number of visitors to a website ... So from a marketing point of view, the bottom line is that the hits are misleading - they are never synonymous with the number of site visitors or page-views".

We considered that readers were likely to understand that the claim "5 million hits" was a reference to the websites popularity and that hits was a reliable measure of that popularity.  We considered that some readers might go so far as to infer that each month Cool Diamonds had five million visitors or that five million web pages had been viewed by visitors.  Because the number of hits a website received was unlikely to reflect, or be a reliable measure of, the number of visitors to the site or pages viewed, we concluded that the claim was likely to mislead readers into thinking the website was more popular than it was.

The ad breached CAP Code clause 7.1 (Truthfulness).

Action

The ad must not appear again in its current form.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)