ASA rules against using website 'hits' in advertising

The UK's advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), has banned an advert that claimed a website received more than 5 million hits each month because 'hits' is not a true measure of popularity.

National press adverts for CoolDiamonds .com stated: "With over 5 million hits each month this website has revolutionised the way we buy diamonds." Rival diamond broker, H. Goldie & Company, complained to the ASA that the claim misleadingly implied that more than five million people visited the website each month.

A 'hit' on a web server means a file was loaded into a visitors browser. Typically a web page will comprise of several files containing text and images meaning that a single page view could generate 10 or more 'hits' - so a hit is not equivalent to the number of pages viewed by a user or the number of visitors.

The ASA noted that 'hits' has been discredited previously as a measure of site popularity.
"We understood that 'hits' was not recognised as a measurement of website traffic by the Joint Industry Committee for Web Standards in the UK (JICWEBS); it only recognised measurements of unique users, page impressions or visits," wrote the ASA.

It also quoted the Institute of Direct Marketing website, which said that, from a marketing point of view, "the bottom line is that the hits are misleading – they are never synonymous with the number of site visitors or page-views."

"We considered that readers were likely to understand that the claim '5 million hits' was a reference to the websites popularity and that hits was a reliable measure of that popularity," said the ASA. "We considered that some readers might go so far as to infer that each month Cool Diamonds had five million visitors or that five million web pages had been viewed by visitors."

"Because the number of hits a website received was unlikely to reflect, or be a reliable measure of, the number of visitors to the site or pages viewed, we concluded that the claim was likely to mislead readers into thinking the website was more popular than it was," it ruled.

The advert was found to be in breach of the requirement for truthfulness and CoolDiamonds.com was ordered not to repeat the ad in its current form.

Article originally published at OUT-LAW.com OUT-LAW.COM is part of international law firm Pinsent Masons.