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, 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 no longer 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.
The number of unique visitors, verified by an independent third party, is likely to be an acceptable way to measure the popularity of a website. In 2013 the ASA upheld a complaint about ads for an online directory service that claimed it was “the UK's leading online directory”. It noted that claim was based on the number of website visits, rather than unique visitors, and had not been verified (192.com Ltd, 20 November 2013).
It is worth noting that the ASA has previously ruled that claims to be customers “favourite” online company or “No. 1” are generally likely to be seen as referring to sales rather than web traffic unless specifically stated otherwise (thebigwebsite Ltd, 21 November 2012 and Jewellery Quarter Bullion Ltd, 18 September 2013).