E-Consultancy reports that Nielsen/NetRatings is to stop reporting page impressions due to the fact that changes in the way that content is displayed on many websites have made the statistic meaningless for much of the web.

Hopefully this will also mean that the word ‘hits’ is no longer used to describe web traffic, as this has always been meaningless, and is (I feel) one of the reasons that online display advertising has struggled to prove its worth.

Back in the days of the dotcom boom it was very common to hear online sales reps describing site traffic in terms of hits. But in fact hits were never a valid metric, as a hit actually refers to (in the words of Wikipedia):

a request for a file from a web server

So if a page has 10 images on it, one person visiting that page would result in at least 10 hits.

So when sales teams proudly boasted that their site got millions of hits, but clients only saw thousands, hundreds or even just tens of leads, they felt mislead. And rightly so. But unfortunately the term never fell out of common parlance (even with people who should know better, such as the journalists at The Observer/Guardian Unlimited).

Hopefully this latest piece of news will mean that we can have a standard, meaningful measurement for web engagement. Although I’m not sure how smoothly this change will take hold, considering the sheer number of websites whose revenue models are based on CPM (cost per thousand impressions). But then again, the new metrics might just prove to be, well, a hit.

Sorry…

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