Web traffic

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Web traffic refers to the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a web site. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit.

Measuring web traffic

Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual pages or sections within a site. The host can track the source of the links and determine which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular page, known as referrers.

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.

The following information can often be determined from the log files:

• 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, most probably because they like it
• Average visit duration – the total length of a users visit
• Average page duration – how long a page is viewed for
• Domain classes – the top level domain of the ISP a visitor uses, useful for finding out geographical statistics
• Busy times – the most popular viewing time of the site would show when would be the best time to do promotional campaigns and when would be the most ideal to perform maintenance
• Most requested pages – the most popular pages
• Most requested entry pages – the entry page is the first page viewed by a visitor and shows which are the pages most attracting visitors
• Most requested exit pages – the most requested exit pages could help find bad pages, broken links or the exit pages may have a popular external link
• Top paths – a path is the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from entry to exit, with the top paths identifying the way most customers go through the site

Specific tracking applications can help present detailed graphs of traffic, analysing the web log or by inserting a small piece of HTML code in every page of the web site. Web sites like Alexa produce traffic rankings and statistics.

Controlling web traffic

The amount of traffic seen by a web site is a measure of its popularity. By analysing the statistics of visitors it is possible to see shortcomings of the site and look to improve those areas. It is also possible to increase (or, in some cases decrease) the popularity of a site and the number of people that visit it.

Limiting access

It is sometimes important to protect some parts of a site by password, allowing only authorised people to visit particular sections or pages.

Some site administrators have chosen to block their page to specific traffic, such as by geographic location. The re-election campaign site for U.S. President George W. Bush (GeorgeWBush.com) was blocked to all Internet users outside of the U.S. on 25 October, 2004 after a reported attack on the site [1].

Increasing web traffic

Web traffic can be increased by placement of a site in search engines and purchase of advertising, including bulk e-mail, pop-up ads, and in-page advertisements. Web traffic can also be purchased by non-internet based advertising.

If a web page is not listed in the first pages of any search, the odds of someone finding it diminishes greatly. Very few people go past the first page, and the percentage that go to subsequent pages is substantially lower. Consequently, getting proper placement on search engines is as important as the web site itself.

Web traffic can be increased organically (mostly through directories and search engines) or by buying traffic through advertising.

Organic traffic

Web traffic that comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as "Organic" traffic. Organic Traffic can be generated/increased by including the web site in Directories (p.e. Yahoo, DMOZ), Search Engines (p.e. Google, Inktomi), Guides (p.e. Yellow Pages, Restaurant Guides) and Award Sites.

In most cases the best way to increase web traffic is to register it with the major search engines. Probably 95% of visitors arrive via a search engine. Just registering does not guarantee traffic. Search engines work by "crawling" registered web sites. These crawling programs (crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or just "robots". Crawlers start at the registered home page, and usually follow the hyperlinks it finds, to get to pages inside the web site (internal links). Crawlers start gathering information about those pages and storing it and indexing it in the search engine database. In every case, they index the page URL and the page title. In most cases they also index the Web page header (meta tag) and a certain amount of the text of the page. Then, when a search engine user looks for a particular word or phrase, the search engine looks into the database and produces the results, usually sorted by relevance, according to the search engine algorithms.

Paid advertising

Banner advertising and Pay per clicks.

Traffic overload

Too much web traffic can dramatically slow down or even prevent all access to a web site. This is caused by more file requests going to the server than it can handle and may be an intentional attack on the site or simply caused by over-popularity. Large scale web sites with numerous servers can often cope with the traffic required and it is more likely that smaller services are affected by traffic overload.

Denial-of-service attacks have forced web sites to close after a malicious attack, flooding the site with more requests than it could cope with. Viruses have also been used to co-ordinate large scale distributed denial-of-service attacks.

A sudden burst of publicity may accidentally cause a web traffic overload. A news item in the media or a link from a popular site may cause such a boost in visitors that the site cannot cope. One particular example of this is the Slashdot effect: with the large number of visitors to the Slashdot site seeing and following a link it is common for the destination site to be overloaded.