Traffic

Traffic in online marketing refers to the flow of visitors and data retrieval on a website. Important metrics include visits/unique visitors, page impressions, and dwell time. Qualified traffic comes through search, ads, links, or social media.

When referring to traffic in online marketing, the term does not mean the congestion on the roads but rather the data flow that occurs when internet users interact with websites – that is, information and content being retrieved from servers. Traffic can be differentiated between the data volume generated when a webpage is accessed and user accesses, which are related to the number of page views (Page Impressions) and user interactions on the website. Particularly, page impressions and visits are the important metrics for traffic in the online marketing domain.

Traffic is usually measured in clicks

Traffic can thus be measured in online marketing in two different ways. Usually, every web host provides statistics on the number of page clicks as well as the source of the users—how they arrived at the website. External analysis services like Google Analytics have also established themselves to determine the traffic of one's own website. The analysis of traffic is usually carried out using so-called log files, which are automatically generated when the website is accessed and collect information about the visitor's activity and duration of activity. However, these are merely statistics that should make up part of a website's analysis. When examining, a long-term period is recommended, which provides information about the development and not just focusing on one day.

Visits

For the visits, visits and unique visits are measured. In measuring the unique visitors, each visitor to a website is assigned an IP address, which allows the individual visitor to be measured. If the user visits several subpages, these count as page impressions or individual visits. If the number of visits decreases, measures should be taken. By improving SEO measures, the number of visitors can be significantly increased. A very good link profile, for example, can already help here.

Page Impressions

Page impressions (PI) refer to the views of an entire page. Page impressions are important for shop operators, for example, to identify interesting subpages for users. This can determine on which pages, for instance, certain advertisements are placed.

Other features that are important for traffic:

Visitor dwell time: how long a visitor spends on a page on the internet
Dwell time of the subpage: the average dwell time of all visitors on a subpage
most visited pages
Peak times: for example, times of the day when most visitors come to the site

Optimize channels for visitors

Basically, it is of high importance and the goal for websites to generate a lot of traffic. Usually, this traffic comes through search engines, search engine ads, links on other websites or in social media, as well as ads on one's own web offering. The higher the probability of a large amount of qualified visitors should be, the more extensive and optimized the corresponding communication tools and channels should be designed. Qualified traffic refers to website visitors who are interested in the content of the website—or whose search query matches the content. They generally lead to high page impressions (number of page views within a website), increase the duration of visits on a website, and consequently improve the revenue, that is, the conversion rate of a webmaster.

The difference between good and bad visitors

However, it does not always have to be qualified visitors who have a genuine interest in content and offers, but also so-called trash traffic. Basically, trash traffic can occur whenever internet users have no interest in the website's content and bounce back. However, if you have to record a relatively high bounce rate, in other words, a lot of trash traffic is coming to the website, you should consider the individual points of search engine optimization. Because then, for example, it may be the case that optimization was done for unsuitable keywords.