Hits was historically a very popular way to measure how busy a website or page was. Unfortunately it is significantly misleading as it is simply a count of requests for information from the web server. A page with dozens of pictures and other elements that must be downloaded would garner significantly more hits from the same number of visitors than a page that was simply one picture and some text. It is therefore possible to measure your own site’s popularity growing over time using hits (provided the mean complexity of your pages remains the same), however as it is so driven by complexity of the site it would not be possible to compare your traffic to another peer site using hits alone. A more accurate measure by far would be the number of unique visitors to the site as measured by more sophisticated analytics software.