What is meant by “traffic”?
Traffic or data traffic refers to the general flow of data within networks. More narrowly defined, this also refers to so-called access to websites. This refers to the user traffic of a page, which is increased by various types of search engine optimization. In online marketing, traffic refers to the number of visitors to a website. Web traffic consists of all data that users send and receive when visiting a website. For Google, traffic is a ranking criterion or indicator, as a good flow of visitors is usually associated with the quality and attractiveness of a website.
In addition to the number of visitors/users/visits or page impressions of a page, web analytics can also be used to determine the unique users. These then tend to determine the quantity of traffic. However, beware of trash traffic, which can be caused by incorrect programming or wrong keywords. Bot traffic, which is artificially generated by computer programs, should also be viewed critically. This is known as ad fraud or click fraud.
How do you measure traffic?
For example, via web analysis tools such as Google Analytics. A lot of traffic data can be collected and analyzed here.
You will receive answers to the following questions:
- How many visitors/users does the site have in a given period?
- How many of them were new visitors/users?
- Where did they come from? (organic or paid search)
- What was the visitor’s/user’s history on the website?
The most important and informative evaluations are those of visits and page impressions.
- Visit is the visit to a website, all page views that a visitor/user makes when visiting the website. The visit ends when the user leaves the page. However, visits do not correspond to the number of visitors, as a visitor can visit a website several times. The visitor’s behavior is the most important information here. Where does he go and when, and how long does he stay there (length of stay)?
- Page impression is simply the visit to a single page. You can use it to determine which pages are visited particularly often, which only rarely and which are not visited at all. The moment a browser calls up a website, a document is created by the server and is then evaluated by the server as a page impression.
How do you evaluate traffic? What are the benefits?
The evaluation is useful for advertising placements, e.g. for Google AdWords or affiliate systems. In order to achieve optimum reach for a campaign, you should know which high-traffic pages you should use to place the ad. Publishers, on the other hand, use these values to see how much money they can charge for their pages. More traffic means a higher investment for the advertiser, but reaching more potential customers. However, it is not traffic alone that counts as a success factor, but the conversions that are generated via the visitor and therefore their efficiency.
Not all traffic is real traffic, i.e. real visitors. Simulations of access as referrer spam falsify the statistics, a black hat method for link building. In many web analysis tools, these data sources are shown as referrals. To find and delete traffic (crawler spam) from a statistic, it is best to use a hostname filter or a campaign source filter.
Paid traffic (paid advertising) is e.g. Facebook ads, pop-ups, banner ads, video ads and AdWords ads.
The advantage of paid advertising is that visitors reach the website relatively quickly, faster than with conventional SEO measures.
The disadvantage of paid advertising is that you don’t know what benefit the campaigns will have. In addition, the purchase is no guarantee that the paid visitors will carry out the desired action on the website.
