Mentioning 'Hits' Is Deceptive Advertising In The UK?
from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept
Over in the UK, it appears that the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has decided that putting the number of hits your website gets into an ad is somehow deceptive advertising. Now, most techies recognize that "hits" are widely discredited as a measure of visitors. But they're not deceptive in and of themselves. They're accurate in showing exactly what they claim: hits, which includes any connection to a server (i.e., every image on a page counts as a separate hit, so a single website could have many, many hits). The fact that some people don't recognize the difference between a hit and a unique user doesn't necessarily mean that a "hit" is deceptive. If the company were saying that 5 million hits equaled 5 million users -- then you could sorta see how their might be an argument concerning deceptive advertising, but just using hits doesn't seem deceptive at all.
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Filed Under: deceptive advertising, hits, uk, visitors
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not a bad thing
Although I wouldn't like forcing people to not use hits, I think some form of trying to get people to use unique hits/unique user instead would be a nice way to raise the bar.
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What?
I saw a "medicine" advertized on tv. It's big selling points were that it was natural and homeopathic. Both claims were true ( but not really indicative of fitness. eg. nicotine, a very toxic drug, is natural and homeopathic "medicines" are concoctions that are made with ingredients picked specifically for their property of causing the same symptoms you are trying to get rid of). Is this ad deceptive also? If so, why? It is completely true and understandable to anyone who knows what the words "natural" and "homeopathic" mean.
Are we to penalize all groups equally for using correct jargon that others don't understand? Or is it only the "nerdy" professions that apparently people aren't required to know what is being said before they make a judgment on it? Where do you set the break point between "the public doesn't need to know what this means and if you use it you will get in trouble" and "the public should educate themselves about the meaning of these words and if they don't, it's their own fault"?
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i guess this falls in the category "protect the ignorant campaign".
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Not quite true
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I have to disagree
I realize this happens in every industry, especially when it comes to marketing. It is still not right.
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Ahem
For instance, a person that runs a TV ad to sell Beer, "might be so stupid" that he doesn't know the frequency and the encryption used to transmit his ad, to perhaps just 60% of the total station's userbase is the audience, due to reception limitations.
An advertiser is not a technical person, and should not be. Hits is an irrelevant parameter for advertisers, and is commonly used for deception.
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Re: Ahem
If I market my ad-space as providing 500 units of "fleetiol" (a term I made up to represent 0 barrels of oil), should I then be responsible for some moron who goes "fleetiol! That's just what I need!" and buys an ad?
What about if I am selling paper and measure the total area you get in square decimeters? Will the general public's unfamiliarity with the term then mean I am being deceptive?
What if a site doesn't keep individual user metrics? Or what if a site is constantly asked by advertisers how many hits they get (regardless if they know whether or not it's not a good indicator of audience size)? In each of those cases, telling people right off the number of hits they get has a legitimate purpose. It could be the only real metric they have, or it could be that they are tired of repeating themselves. Would the site be deceptive then? If so, explain the deception, if not explain why the same action by similar parties could be deceptive from one, and not deceptive from another.
Further, why should advertisers be exempt from ever needing to pick up a dictionary and look up a word they don't understand? I feel absolutely no pity for people who buy things based on irrelevant information when, if they had not been both physically and intellectually lazy, they would have made a better decision.
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A hit by any other name...
But that's the thing, you can't pick up and dictionary and get an objective definition of a web site "hit". I've been using the WWW since the days of Mosaic, but I'll have do admit that I've always thought of a "hit" as loading a single web page, not each graphic file on the page. So, you can look up exactly what a "decimeter" is, but even though "hit" is a technical term, it's not one that is completely objective. I'm not saying that the asnwer is regulation, but I can see where using a term that means different things to different people can be considered deceptive.
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Re: A hit by any other name...
Here are all the definitions:
1: an act or instance of hitting or being hit
2 a: a stroke of luck b: a great success
3: a telling or critical remark
4: base hit
5: a quantity of a drug ingested at one time
6: a premeditated murder committed especially by a member of a crime syndicate
7: an instance of connecting to a particular Web site
8: a successful match in a search (as of a computer database or the Internet)
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I would say the definition is ambiguous because it doesn't make a distinction between the different types of connections.
Here's the relevent definition of "hit"...
7: an instance of connecting to a particular Web site
Without any other context, I would read this to mean simply that if a person types in a URL and the web site appears in their browser, you have one "hit". The person has connected to the web site by bringing up its home page. The fact that there were three jpg's on the home page (requiring three different trips to the site's server) is irrelevent. Based on the definition above -- and I'd guess most people's common sense definition -- the person has only connected to the site once.
But this is in direct contradiction to the definition Mike is using...
"[a hit] includes any connection to a server (i.e., every image on a page counts as a separate hit, so a single website could have many, many hits)."
So, even with the dictionary definition, the term "hit" is ambiguous. It's one of those words that have different meaning in different contexts. In the context of advertising, I would say that most people would think of a "hit" as equivolent to a unique user.
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The proof is in the pudding
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Hits
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