This would seem to throw a litle light on to the ludicrous figures - which Mr Botting thinks are fair?

"There is often a great misconception about what is commonly known as "hits" and what is really effective, quality traffic to your site. Hits simply means the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. For example, if your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. As you can see, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic".

extract from "Know your visitors through Website Traffic Analysis" at
http://iamroom.blogspot.com/2007/08/kno ... bsite.html