Brief explanation about Website Traffic

Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site. Web traffic can be analysed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server log file, an automatically-generated list of all the pages served. A hit is generated when any file is served. The page itself is considered a file, but images are also files, thus a page with 5 images could generate 6 hits (the 5 images and the page itself). A page view is generated when a visitor requests any page within the web site – a visitor will always generate at least one page view (the main page) but could generate many more.

Tracking applications external to the web site can record traffic by inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the web site. Web traffic is also sometimes measured by packet sniffing and thus gaining random samples of traffic data from which to extrapolate information about web traffic as a whole across total Internet usage.

The following types of information are often collated when monitoring web traffic:
The number of visitors.The average number of page views per visitor – a high number would indicate that the average visitors go deep inside the site, possibly because they like it or find it useful. Conversely, it could indicate an inability to find desired information easily.

• Average visit duration – Total length of a user's visit
• Average page duration – How long a page is viewed for.
• Domain classes – Levels of IP Addressing information.
• Busy times – The most popular viewing time.
• Most requested pages – The most popular pages.
• Most requested exit pages – The most requested exit pages.

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