Maybe it should be all about the unique visitors instead.

Odeo CEO Evan Williams’ article appearing at AjaxWorld discussed the genesis of the web metric, starting with the early days of hits, and how measuring traffic has evolved over time.

Hits quickly came and went as webmasters realized they didn’t give a true indication of traffic or activity on a website.

Web analytics programs helped webmasters look at pageviews, and see patterns in the arriving traffic.

Those patterns would enable the webmaster to see which paths visitors took through the site.

For e-commerce websites, this provided some insight into where they may be converting a sale, like with a promotion, or losing one, such as when people see the shipping cost and abandon the shopping cart.

Ajax implementations could impact those sites, along with ones that depend on a CPM model for their advertising revenue.

On a page that refreshes content without a page reload, a user could conceivably view a number of items in rapid order, but only count as one ad impression.

The report noted how comScore Media Metrix uses unique visitors as its defining criteria for judging a site’s popularity.

More uniques in a month influences a much higher score. That isn’t the only criteria comScore uses, but uniques are very important.

Williams suggested that a combination of time spent on a site and unique visitors might be a better indicator of traffic and how it should be measured.

That would propel a serious rethinking of advertising fees for sites that sell on a CPM basis. Marketers may prefer buying on a unique visitor/time spent metric. Those that carry the ads will likely resist such a change.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.