Page impressions and hits

In talking to job boards you may be quoted page impressions and hits as being relevant statistics. But what are page impressions and hits and are they really important?

What are page impressions and hits?

Of all the statistics quoted, ‘page impressions’ (also called page views) and ‘hits’ are perhaps the least relevant or meaningful for recruiters. Sadly, they are often quoted because they are usually very large numbers and sound very big and impressive. But when you realise what they actually count you will understand just how irrelevant these statistics are for recruiters.

The page impression statistic is simply a count of the number of individual pages a website shows over a particular period (usually a month). For example, when you arrived at whatjobsite you saw our home page. This was one page impression. You then clicked through a number of links and searches to get to this page. On each click you were brought to a new page and, thus, the total number of page impressions increased.

It’s just the same on job boards: job seekers come to the site and look for jobs and look at pages and, therefore, rack up page impressions. But page impressions don’t explain what the person did with those pages or whether they even applied for a job. What’s more, depending on how the job board is designed you may have to look at more pages to do exactly the same thing as you could on another site by looking at far fewer pages.

‘Hits’ are even less relevant and, in our view, dangerous. Many people mistakenly believe that ‘hits’ bear some relation to website visitors or people. But they don’t. A hit is the technical count of the total number of individual files (graphics etc.) or elements requested from a server.

To explain this better let’s look at the page you are currently reading. This web page is constructed of lots of elements. There’s the text, the formatting of the text, the graphics (logo, background images in the navigation menu, advertising, buttons, JavaScripts and HTML.) In order to view the page properly, all of these are elements have to be downloaded. And all of these little downloads count as ‘hits.’ Therefore, looking at this single page might result in some 10 or 20 hits. One another site looking at a single page might require 40 or 50 hits.

Unfortunately, the statistic is often quoted because people mistakenly believe it has some relation to people. And a million hits sounds like a lot. But it is not the same as a million users. A million hits could be generated by just 10,000 pages with 100 elements on each page. And if people look at an average of 10 pages each, we can see that just 1000 people could generate a million hits very easily.

Why are they important for recruiters?

They aren’t important. Both page impressions/views and hits offer little of any value for recruiters. The key to successful job advertising is finding the best audience for your job. So, the next time someone tells you they get a million hits, you’ll know that either they don’t know what they are talking about or they are being disingenuous. In either case, it’s unlikely that they will offer a quality advertising option for you.

Next step? Read the next article in the series

1. Unique users and visits on job boards
2. Registered users on job boards
3. Job application statistics on job boards
4. Email subscribers on job boards
5. CV database statistics on job boards
6. Page impressions and hits
7. NEXT>> Audited statistics on job boards
8. Using statistics to choose a job board