What is web traffic? (2021)

What is web traffic? (2021)

Web traffic is measured in visits, sometimes called “sessions,” and is a common way to measure an online business effectiveness at attracting an audience.

• is measured to see the popularity of websites and individual pages or sections within a site.
• This can be done by viewing the traffic statistics that can be found in the web server log file, an automatically generated list of all pages visited. A hit is generated when a file is served.
• The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, so a page with 5 images can yield 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself).
• A pageview is generated when a visitor requests a page within the website – a visitor will always generate at least one pageview (the main page) but can generate many more.

Tracking applications outside the website can register traffic by inserting a small piece of HTML code on each page of the website.

Web traffic is also sometimes measured by packet sniffing to obtain random samples of traffic data from which information about web traffic as a whole can be extrapolated over total Internet usage.

The following types of information are often collected when monitoring web traffic:

• the number of visitors.

• The average number of pageviews per visitor – a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep into the site, possibly because they find it fun or useful.

• Average Visit Duration – The total duration of a user’s visit. The more time they spend, the more interested they are in your business and the sooner they get in touch.

• Average page duration – how long a page is viewed. The more pages viewed, the better for your business.

• Domain classes – all levels of the IP addressing information required to deliver web pages and content.

• Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would indicate when would be the best time to run promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance

• Most requested pages – the most popular pages

• Most requested home pages – the home page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which pages are attracting the most visitors

• Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages can help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages can be a popular external link have

• Top Paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths indicating the way most customers move through the site referrers

• from; The host can track the (apparent) source of the links and determine which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular page.

Websites produce traffic rankings and statistics based on those people who visit the sites while using their toolbars and other online measurement resources.

The difficulty with this is that it doesn’t look at the full traffic image for a site. Large sites usually hire the services of companies such as the Nielsen NetRatings or Quantcast, but their reports are only available by subscription.