While presenting at Howard Brinton’s Star Power 2007 the last week in July, we had no less than 50 people approach us with some version of the same question: "Are hits an accurate reflection of my traffic?"

One might argue traffic is traffic and it depends on what one considers a return for their investment of time, effort & money. In our view site metrics and business metrics are different and site metrics do NOT necessarily translate to the bottom line. Generally our answer is, “Unless visitation numbers solely reflect humans, the traffic isn’t potential leads, listings or sales.”

It’s relevant to explain that using the word hit as a synonym for traffic can easily exaggerate the numbers with 1) non- human bot traffic or by 2) the fact that a single web-page typically consists of multiple (often dozens) files. In this case, each file gets counted as a hit as the page is downloaded making the number of hits more reflective of complex website pages than actual traffic. In the first scenario, bot [crawler or spider] traffic is typically a lot more than, if not the majority of, total visitor traffic.

It’s also important to add that Google Yahoo, MSN, AOL, etc. bot [crawler or spider] visitation is very important to a website or Blog owner; however, millions of other bots continuously crawl the web and many have different, sometimes less than valuable or even nefarious, intentions. For those not familiar, the Google bot is software deployed to collect documents from the web in order to build a search-able index for their search engine. Without a visit from the Google bot, one cannot be indexed or, as a result, show up in Google search results. In fact Real Estate Blogsites™, who market, sell, service and provide two forms of traffic analytic & performance tracking. One strictly tracks Google bot & Google [human] search activity, while the other [VisiStat who we proudly endorse], which not only offers incredibly rich traffic data and an undeniably layperson- friendly dashboard, strictly tracks human visitation.

While it may be more impressive for a Realtor to share hit numbers to a listing prospect, an alternative strategy might be to educate prospects on both sets of data… leaving the competition to deal with an informed homeowner. In summary, websites and blogs are marketing solutions and we feel that folks should be clear on their business metrics and what actual return there is for their investment of time, effort & money.