Once a day I check Google search results for several things including Mobile Marketing to see what’s shaking. Over the last couple of days I’ve noticed this Google News result that appeared in Fox Business getting thrown into the mix. It’s a garden variety press release from Mvive regarding their “Get Mobilized” campaign, a mobile website coupon promotion that ran recently in Canada.
What I find interesting about this press release is the fact that Mvive choose to report the number of mobile web site hits and not the number of visitors or users generated by the campaign. Better yet, what was the conversion rate on that mobile coupon? I read this press release and came away thinking that it maybe didn’t do so well because of the fact that the press release talked up “hits”.
I could be entirely wrong too, but that’s my own personal opinion because I know that a “hit” represents not just the page view but all of the objects on the page including images, css files… pretty much everything in the page. To give you an idea, if you’re reading my blog in your web browser the page you’re looking at probably generated 50-100 hits for this one single page view. Suppose you cruise around my site and view 15 pages? See the problem, now you’re talking about 1 visitor, 15 pages and 750 to 1,500 hits.
Here’s a quote from Roy Choi, President of Mvive.
“There are so many statistics out there which validate the fact that marketing through mobile cell phones, Blackberrys, etc., is the hot, technology wave of the future and receiving 5.5M website hits during a testing program is just another indication of the interest and soon the demand, for this application of mobile devices. At Mvive, we look forward to leading the technology charge in the mobile marketing arena”
Anyone that’s got web in their background knows that web hits are relatively meaningless. Well, not entirely, I mean I suppose one could argue that they do in fact have a purpose but I’m fairly certain that it’s not a marketing metric. Web hits in my mind are something that you might want to consider tracking for capacity planning purposes. Bandwidth usage can help out with that too. Those things help you determine when you might need an additional server or a fatter bandwidth pipe right? From an analytics perspective they’re not your lead dog when touting your campaign stats are they? Go take a look at the Mobilytics features… you won’t find “hits” on the list.
5.5M hits is a decent enough number that probably represents something worth talking about in regards to Page Views, I’m just puzzled that they decided to promote hits vs. Page Views, Visitors or Conversions though. That would have been something to talk up in my opinion.
