Measuring Web Traffic For An Effective
Site
Thousands of data are sent and received by users in the
Internet every second. Just imagine how web developers manage
to handle such large volume of data (with different genre such
as music files, PDF, and others). Most of these are data that
potential customers are looking for. If you can find the people
who are looking for data or information related to your site,
you can direct them to your site and increase your web
traffic.
The more traffic you get, the better it ius for your site to
become successful and profitable.
How can you determine the traffic that flows from a variety
of websites? One parameter is by the number of visitors and the
number of pages that they view. The website moderator
supervises both incoming and outgoing traffic to determine
which parts or mostly visitors view pages of it.
Let us say for instance, you have accessed the webpage of a
certain site. Maybe you will notice that there is a certain
figure in the page that says, "Welcome! You are the 999,999th
visitor in this site." That is one way the site is determining
the traffic in that certain page.
The gathered data in web traffic monitoring help configure
sites and increase its security system against viruses and
hackers.
Measuring Web Traffic
Creating a website is costly. You need to hire web designers
for that matter. In return, your site must be popular among web
users so that it can gain advertisers and promoters. Thus, it
creates an income on your part.
By measuring and analyzing your web sites, web traffic you
will see if your site is popularly viewed. However, how is this
done?
Traffic around your site is analyzed by viewing the traffic
statistics found in the web server record file. It is an
automatically generated list of all the pages served.
This is how it works: A hit is produced when any file is
served. The web page itself is considered a file. Images are
considered as files, too. Thus, if a certain page has five
images, it could generate six hits.
Sometimes, web traffic is measured by packet sniffing.
Usually a software program can interrupt and monitor traffic
passing over a digital network.
As data passes back and forth over the network, the sniffer
captures each packet and eventually deciphers and examines its
content according to the appropriate specifications. All the
data that the sniffer captured is recorded and included in the
web traffic analysis.
The following information is often gathered when supervising
web traffic:
- The quantity of web visitors
- The average number of page views per visitor. It will
indicate that he is going deep inside that particular site
possibly because he finds the information useful.
- Average visit duration- the total length of a user's
visit
- Average page duration- the length of time the page is
viewed for
- Busy times- the most popular visiting time of the site.
It can be used to decide when is the best time to put
advertisement and the most ideal to make some
maintenance.
- Most requested entry pages viewed
- Most requested exit pages would determine bad pages,
broken links, or exit pages that may have a popular
external link.
- The top paths or the sequence of pages viewed by
visitors from their entry and exit to the site. It
identifies which paths he is using to browse the site.
- The external links to determine which sites are
creating the most traffic for a particular page.
Once the data had been gathered, web planners will now use
it as reference on how to improve that particular site.
Sometimes, there are problems that may arise from huge quantity
of visitors browsing the same site on the same time.
From the gathered traffic data, they will now plan some site
structuring to accommodate larger volumes of users accessing
the site.
Web traffic is an important factor considered when creating
a website. Your site will gain popularity to web users if it is
easy to access. In addition, fast exchange of information is
one of the vital characteristics of an effective website.
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