If anyone who isn't a network engineer mentions "hits" to you, they're probably trying to pull the cyberwool over your eyes. Hits are the individual requests a server answers in order to render a single Web page completely. The page document itself, the various images on the page, any other media files embedded there - each of these items represents a separate hit. In other words, the more GIFs used in a page, the higher the hit count - so while hits may be a good indication of poor page design, they won't tell you much about traffic.