There is often a great troublesome misunderstanding about what is commonly known as “hits” and what really effective quality traffic is. Hits simply mean the number of information requests received by the server. If you think about the fact that a hit can simply equate to the number of graphics per page, you will get an idea of how overblown the concept of hits can be. If your homepage has 15 graphics on it, the server records this as 15 hits, when in reality we are talking about a single visitor checking out a single page on your site. Now add traffic exchanges which do nothing but get you kicked out of AdSense, and maybe casual browsers just hitting blogger´s “next” button, hits are not useful in analyzing your website traffic anymore.
The more visitors that come to your website, the more accurate your interpretation will become. The greater the traffic is to your website, the more precise your analysis will be of overall trends in visitor behavior, and what visitors want on your site. The smaller the number of visitors, the more a few anomalous visitors can distort the analysis.
Why should you care about who visits you, how they found you and where they came from? Well, once you figure out how well or how poorly your site is working for your visitors. Determining how long on average your visitors spend on your site can help you know what is right, and what is wrong. If the time spent is relatively brief, it usually indicates that the people who entered your site through a keyword did not find what they’re looking for.
Symbol for web traffic
It could be that your keywords are directing the wrong type of visitors to your website, or that your graphics are confusing or intimidating, causing the visitor to exit rapidly. Use the knowledge of how much time visitors are spending on your site to pinpoint specific problems, and after you fix those problems, continue to use time spent as a gauge of how effective your fix has been. Although mis-driven traffic by keywords such as AdSense tricks or Adsense tips, or even AdSense secrets can give you lots of hits, this traffic is rather ineffective, and could get you ranked as a Spam site.
Additionally, web traffic stats can help you determine effective and ineffective areas of your website. If you have a page that you believe is important, but visitors are exiting it rapidly, that page needs attention. You could, for example, consider improving the link to this page by making the link more noticeable and enticing, or you could improve the look of the page or the ease that your visitors can access the necessary information on that page. If your readers come in, simply browse through a few photos and don’t read anything, don’t click anything, you aren’t making full use of your site.
Your website undoubtedly has exit pages, such as a final order, site link, affiliate program or contact form. This is a page you can expect your visitor to exit rapidly, yet however, not every visitor to your site is going to find exactly what he or she is looking for, so statistics may show you a number of different exit pages. Make sure that these exit pages are sites that you wish to drive traffic to, or programs you can make money from.
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