What Is Online Traffic?

Web traffic is the number of web users who visit a website. Since the mid-1990s, it has represented the biggest portion of internet traffic. Web traffic is determined by the number of visitors, as well as the number of pages they visit.

These visits are called “sessions” – this is how an online business measures its effectiveness at attracting an audience. Each person who clicks on a website is recorded as a visit/session. There are also registered starting and ending points of these visits due to the “communication” between the users’ devices and the website.

Why tracking traffic is important?

When we analyze a website’s performance we have to pay attention to several metrics such as the time users spend on a website (bounce rate and time on page metrics), how many users made a purchase (conversion rate), and how much it costs to bring a visitor to a website (web traffic is free, however many online businesses rely on paid traffic, like PPC – pay-per-click).

Through web traffic analysis we can also determine how successful our business strategies are. For example, if your website is offering a sale on certain products/services, you can measure the traffic produced by this sale.

What is social traffic?

There is also another type of traffic – social traffic. This refers to traffic coming to a website, or mobile app from social media platforms. For example, if a consumer clicks on a promotional Facebook post and then arrives on your website, this will be recorded in your analytics reports as social traffic. This type of traffic can be paid or organic.

Social traffic basically measures the performance of social media campaigns regarding the ability to generate website traffic, as well as conversions. So a great way to measure social media return of investment is to monitor how much social traffic comes from each social media channel and how many goals are achieved thanks to those visits.