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Web traffic

Web traffic refers to the number of users that visit a given location or specific page on the internet.

Whereas web "visitors" refer to individuals, web "traffic" indicates a collective, large amount of users. Web traffic can be purchased by placement in search engines and purchase of advertising, including bulk e-mail, pop-up ads, and in-page advertisements. Web traffic can also be purchased by non-internet based advertising.

Web traffic that comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as "Organic" traffic.

Measuring Web Traffic

The most direct way to measure web traffic is to analyze the traffic statistics found in the web server logs. The logs record hits, visits & Daily Uniques or Monthly Uniques, which do not count the same person as a visitor, in that particular period (Daily or Monthly).

Average page views per visitor

This is the number obtained by dividing the total number of page views by the number of visitors. Usually, it indicates how interested are visitors to the site. A number close to one would indicate that visitors just see one page and go away. A high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site, most probably because they like it.

Average visit duration

When a visitor spends a lot of time in the web site, it probably is a good indication that the web site is of great interest to the visitor.

Average page duration

This number is similar to the average visit duration, but indicates interest in a particular page. This number could depend a lot in the quantity of information in the page.

Domain Classes

This refers to the .com or .gov or .us or .uk (or whatever the extension) of the referrer web page. Is a good indication of the geographical location of the visitors.

Geographic Areas

This can be obtained by the domain classes (some indicate international domains) and also by the IP address of the visitor. There are programs that trace IPs geographically (p.e. VisualRoute)

Visits or Page Views per hours of day or days of week

This numbers would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns)

Most requested pages

These show what are visitors looking for, mostly, in the web site.

Most requested entry pages

The entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor. Entry pages show which are the pages really attracting the visitors. In most web sites the home page seems to be the most requested entry page, but it might not be.

Most requested exit pages

Most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links, useless pages. Or maybe, exit pages have a very interesting external link that is prompting visitors to go outside the web page in question.

Top paths

A path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit. Top paths identify the way most customers go through the site.

Increasing Web Traffic

Web traffic can be increased organically (mostly through directories and search engines) or by buying traffic through advertising.

Organic Traffic

Organic Traffic can be generated/increased by including the web site in Directories (p.e. Yahoo, DMOZ), Search Engines (p.e. Google, Inktomi), Guides (p.e. Yellow Pages, Restaurant Guides) and Award Sites.

In most cases the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Probably 95% of visitors arrive via a search engine. Just registering does not guarantee traffic. Search engines work by "crawling" registered web sites. These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or just "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page URL and the page title. In most cases they also index the Web page header (meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance, according to the search engine algorithms.

Paid Advertising

Banner advertising and CPCs.