Note: This advice is given by the CAP Executive about non-broadcast advertising. It does not constitute legal advice. It does not bind CAP, CAP advisory panels or the Advertising Standards Authority.
Measures used to assess the popularity of a website can be confusing to the consumer. Three different ways have been traditionally used to assess website traffic:
"Unique users" or "browsers" are the number of devices that connect to a website in a given period.
"Visits" are the number of times those devices connect to the website in a given period.
"Page views" are the number of pages viewed on the website. It is also known as page impressions.
"Hits" are the number of items, such as files or images, retrieved from a website. For example, when a visitor calling up a web page with four graphics produces five hits, one for the page and four for the graphics.
Consequently, the number of hits often reflects the complexity of individual pages on the website more than the website’s popularity and is now not recognised as a measurement of website traffic by the Joint Industry Committee of Web Standards in the UK (JICWEBS).
In 2008, the ASA upheld a complaint about an ad, for a jeweller’s website, that claimed “over 5 million hits each month” (Cool Diamonds, 6 August 2008). Because it considered readers might be confused about the various different measures of web traffic and because readers might not understand that hits were an unscientific, unreliable and fairly meaningless metric, the ASA concluded that the claim was misleading. Claims of a website’s popularity by measuring hits are almost certainly going to be considered misleading and a breach of Rules 3.1 and 3.7.
It could nevertheless be acceptable to state the number of hits to a website as a stand-alone claim or as a comparison with the number of hits on a rival’s website. But it is likely to be misconstrued as a claim about web traffic and therefore mislead about the site’s popularity.
Last modified : 29 June 2010