Website traffic is crucial. Understanding website traffic is even more crucial. Traffic is an important part of business website or blogs. Traffic information is very important to the success of website marketing program. Your business will only prosper when you have a flow of people visiting your website daily. You need to know about how many came, who are visiting, where the people are from, who referred the people and when they came. You need all the information to determine how successful the marketing program, how best to do fine-tuning and to achieve better traffic result. There are many traffic tools available over the internet. Some are free and others are not. They also differ in terms of efficiency and depth of reports available.
Besides having suitable traffic tools, you also need to understand web traffic analysis based on the report from the tools. Looking at the output of any web traffic tools, you need to understand the terms being used. There are three measurements that are normally used with web site traffic. They are hits, pages and visits.
Hits can be a big number but not really meaningful. It can be misleading. Hits are calculated according to how many times all the components of a single page are requested. A single web page may require few requests as it may contain few elements each calculated separately. Each element requires one request. For blogs, since there could be many elements on one web site, the hits for one single page request can be quite high. Examples of page element are the HTML page itself, external style sheets, external JavaScript files and each graphic image.
Pages are also called page views. This is more meaningful as it counts the actual single page display. A page contains many elements and the page view should only count that as one to be accurate. We don’t really care how many times an element is requested, but we are very interested in knowing how many times a page is displayed. Page view is also called unique page view.
Visits are even more current. It is a traffic number that counts the visit by a unique visitor. It is tied to the ability to distinguish between different people visiting your web site at the same time. A visit is usually considered as one or more page views from a unique user within an hour. If another visit is done after more than one hour, it would be counted as another visit.
If you host your own web sites, you may have access to the web log files. A log file records every hit registered by the web server. These data are raw and unfiltered. It is not easy to read and understand the log files. However the information can be very useful especially in understanding the nature of traffic visiting your web site. It is a worthwhile effort learning to read traffic log files.
Traffic tools can be installed locally or hosted externally (web-based) by third party. Examples of locally installed tools are The Webalizer, Urchin (from Google), AWStats and WebTrends. Your web host might have one or more of these already available. Visit the links to learn more about how to better utilize the tools and understand the reports.
Examples of web-based tools are Site Meter, StatCounter and Google Analytics. Those are free of charge. If you need more variety of website traffice tools, here are two sites that have a collection of many such tools available: Analytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website Traffic by Mashable and Track Website Traffic: 40+ Great Tools by Technology Magazine.
