Greatest Hits fail to score with the ASA

26 September 2008

How do you assess the popularity of a website?  Not by judging its number of “hits”, according to a recent ASA adjudication.  If you’re as confused as the average consumer, here is a list of traditional definitions to assess traffic to a website:

Unique visitors - the most widely used metric, it refers to the number of visits by different people to the website.

Page views - the number of pages viewed on the website, also known as page impressions.

Hits - the number of items, such as files or images, retrieved from a website.  For example, when a visitor calls up a web page with four graphics, that act produces five hits, one for the page and four for the graphics.  Consequently, the number of hits often more reflects the complexity of individual pages on the website than the website’s true popularity.

In August 2008, the ASA upheld a complaint about an ad that used “hits” as a measurement of traffic to a website.  A press ad, for a diamond retailer, stated  that it was “Europe’s largest on-line jewellers.  With over 5 million hits each month, this website has revolutionised the way we buy diamonds”.  Because it considered that readers would be muddled by the term “hit” and that hits are an unreliable and fairly meaningless measurement of website traffic, the ASA concluded that the ad was misleading.  Click here to read the adjudication 

If you want to avoid being “hit” by the ASA, consult CAP Copy Advice.  CAP’s team of advisers know the CAP Code inside out and have in-depth knowledge of the latest ASA adjudications; that makes them well-qualified to spot potential problems with your campaigns and advise you on the changes you should make.  You can consult us by calling 020 7492 2210, e-mailing enquiries to copyadvice@cap.org or accessing our AdviceOnline database on the CAP website.