subject: Measuring Web Traffic: How It's Done And Why It's Important [print this page] It is the fervent hope of every website owner that their page be visited as often as possible and by as many people as possible, as well. Whether their goal is to achieve online fame or to make money through selling the products in their website, webmasters everywhere know that the key is to generate web traffic.
However, most website owners forget the importance of measuring the traffic that comes into one's website. They forget that knowing who visits one's websites, why they visit, and when they visit are all important aspects in not only increasing the traffic, but improving one's site as well. If one knows why people are visiting their website and which pages they visit most, one can improve on those qualities and duplicate those qualities on other pages as well. Similarly, if one can find out why people leave one's website immediately, then he can fix the problem. Not only that, knowing who visits one's page can give one an idea how to advertise and what demographic to focus on.
There are many, varied ways to measure web traffic. For example, one can use the number of hits that one receives as a measure of web traffic. Hits are files loaded by a browser, so the more files there are on a page, the more hits it gets. Traffic to a website can also be measured using page views which are when people click a page and completely load it. Another way to measure traffic is to see if people are staying long in one site or not and this is called a session. These are just a few ways to measure web traffic to one's site. By focusing on one or all of those methods, one can get a clear picture of how people are responding to the website. By keeping track of one's hits, page views, or sessions, one will know how the website is doing.
Additionally, there are some tools that one can use to give more information about web traffic and how to measure and increase it. For example, by using Compete, one can type in a URL to find out an estimate of their traffic, growth, and velocity. Compete also allows web owners to know what keywords are leading people to their site. Quantcast can also help web owners know their demographics as well providing an estimate of the frequency of visitors from that demographic. Web owners can even add a tracking code on their own websites so that the information can be used by Quantcast for more data. Using the above tools can greatly help any web owner to improve on their website and make more sales by driving traffic to it.
