Basic Traffic Metrics

Analysing your traffic time to time will be a great idea. Checking your traffic metrics can be very usefull, it will show you if you should improve your site in any exact page or checking which page that people are most liking in your site and may be expand it.

Hits

A hit is any request for a file from a web server. Every single request, including images, CSS files, JavaScript files, etc.. is considered a hit. When a visitor accesses a page, there could be any number of hits to your server.

However, because they don’t measure anything sifnifican other than page load times, they are not a reliable measure of traffic that’s why when most people refer to traffic, they mean page views.

Page Views

A single page view is considered a successful loading of a full file from a web server. Collectively, page views are a good metric for site popularity.Your site may not have many visits but if each one generates 20 page views, visitors are obviously finding your content interesting. In addition, page views correlate with how many advertisements are displayed.

Page view also relate to you how effectively your content is converting. Ideally, if you have a highly converting site, you would like to see a small number of page views per visit. However, if you are noticing that visitors are viewing more pages than expected, you may need to investigate why. Perhaps your content does not contain enough information, or visitors are having hard time navigating to the correct page.

Visit

A visit is an approximation of a single user visiting your entire website. Typically, it tracks the actions of a single user-agent/IP address. This allows you to track how many times your site has been visited.

Unique Visitors

A unique visitor is a visitor who has come to your website within a pre-defined time frame. Unique visitors can be tracked by a cookie or through their IP address. Cookies are a much more accurate method of tracking unique visitors, since many users are given a different IP address each time they connect to the internet.

Now that you have a better understanding of the basic metrics, let’s take a look at the metrics that tell you where your visitors are coming from.

Referrer

A referrer corresponds to the URL from which a visitor arrives at your page. It can be broken down into two parts: A referrer domain and a referrer page.

A typical referrer URL from Google looks something like this:

http://www.google.com/seaarch?q=keyword&start=10

The first part of the URL:

http://www.google.com

Is the referrer domain. This metric shows you how much overall traffic you receive from the site. The second part of the URL is the referrer page. This metric shows you which keyword is driving the traffic and from which page on your site it is located.