Web traffic
Online Advertising
Web traffic
Example graph of web traffic at Wikipedia in December 2004Web
traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a
web site. It is a large portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the
number of visitors and the number of pages they visit. Sites monitor the
incoming and outgoing traffic to see which parts or pages of their site are
popular and if there are any apparent trends, such as one specific page being
viewed mostly by people in a particular country. There are many ways to monitor
this traffic and the gathered data is used to help structure sites, highlight
security problems or indicate a potential lack of bandwidth
not all web traffic is welcome.
Some companies offer advertising schemes that, in return for increased web
traffic (visitors), pay for screen space on the site. Sites also often aim to
increase their web traffic through inclusion on
search engines.
Measuring web traffic
Web traffic is measured to see the popularity of web sites and individual
pages or sections within a site.
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.
Tracking applications external to the web site can record traffic by
inserting a small piece of
HTML code in every
page of the web site.
Web traffic is also sometimes measured by
packet sniffing and thus gaining random samples of traffic data from which to
extrapolate information about web traffic as a whole across total Internet
usage.
The following types of information are often collated when monitoring web
traffic:
- 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, possibly because
they like it or find it useful. Conversely, it could indicate an inability
to find desired information easily.
- Average visit duration the total length of a user's 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
- Referrers; The host can track the (apparent) source of the
links
and determine which sites are generating the most traffic for a particular
page.
Web sites like
Alexa Internet
[1] produce traffic rankings and statistics based on those people who access
the sites while using the Alexa toolbar. The difficulty with this is that it's
not looking at the complete traffic picture for a site. Large sites usually hire
the services of companies like Nielsen Netratings
[2], but their reports are available only by subscription.
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].
It is also possible to limit access to a web server both based on the number
of connections and by the bandwidth expended by each connection. On
Apache HTTP servers, this is accomplished by the limitipconn module
and others.
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 increased by purchasing
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 (especially if there is other competition
on the first page). 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.
There are a number of other things you can do to increase your web traffic,
including but not limited to building link popularity, offering free e-books or
articles and classified advertisements.
Of the above mentioned items,perhaps the easiest one to do is building link
popularity. This can be accomplished by writing e-mails to sites similar to
yours and asking if they would link to your site.The second way of increasing
your web traffic is writing to e-zines or to free article sites.There are many
sites which will accept your written material, the catch is that you are giving
it away for free. The benefit however is that you get to include a link to site
in the article. Meaning everytime someone clicks on your link, it is free
traffic for your.
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. Just registering does not guarantee traffic, as search
engines work by "crawling" registered web sites. These crawling programs
(crawlers) are also known as "spiders" or "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.
Usually, the top organic result gets most of the clicks from internet users.
According to some studies the top result gets between 5% and 10% of the clicks.
Each subsequent result gets between 30% and 60% of the clicks of the previous
one. So it is definitely important to appear in the top results. There are some
companies that specialize in search engine marketing. However, it is becoming
common for webmasters to get approached by "boiler-room" companies with no real
knowledge of how to get results. As opposed to Pay per Clicks, search engine
marketing is usually paid monthly or yearly, and most search engine companies
cannot promise specific results for what is paid to them.
Because of the huge amount of information available on the internet, crawlers
might take days, weeks or months to complete review and index all the pages they
find. Google, for example, as of the end of 2004 had indexed over 8 billion
pages. Even having hundreds or thousands of servers working on the spidering of
pages, a complete reindex takes its time. That is why some pages recently
updated in certain web sites are not immediately found when doing searches on
search engines.
Paid advertising
Dozens of
pop-up ads cover a desktop
In return for a small payment many larger companies choose to advertise their
sites on other popular sites. This
e-marketing usually takes the form of:
-
Banner advertising: Banner impressions are sold by the thousands, and
referred to as
Cost Per Impression (CPM). As of 2004, prices range from $1/CPM for a
run-of-network to about $50/CPM or more for specialized targeted runs. Most
popular web sites sell banner advertising space, with the notable exception
of Google.
-
Pay per clicks: Advertisers "buy" keywords or keyphrases by bidding on
them against other advertisers. The so called Pay-per-click engines sell
their premium spaces showing in the searches the highest paying advertisers.
Google sells paid advertisement through its
AdWords
and AdSense
systems, which place sponsored links on search pages.
Overture, now owned by Yahoo!, is one of the most popular pay-per-click advertising venues.
As users got used to seeing banners, some companies chose to make the
advertisements more intrusive
pop-up ads
became particularly popular to attract attention. However, most people consider
pop-ups a nuisance and several software companies offer free pop-up blockers.
Even Microsoft included a pop-up blocker in Service Pack 2 of Windows XP.
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
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS 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.
Sudden popularity
A sudden burst of publicity may accidentally cause a web traffic overload. A
news item in the
media, a quickly-propogating email, or a link from a popular site may cause such
a boost in visitors (sometimes called a flash crowd) that overwhelms the site.
Web sites have been forced to close after an unexpected mass increase of
traffic, particularly those run by an individual leasing the bandwidth from an
ISP or hosting site. Some sites backed by large companies running their own
servers have also been caught out by the problems of overpopularity. When first
announced, the Vision of Britain Through Time site, containing information taken
from the 1901 UK census, was advertised on numerous television programmes and
causing such interest that the site had to be taken offline until different
arrangements were made to cope with the traffic. The site was hosted by a
project at the University of Edinburgh and they had not foreseen the amount of bandwidth
and the server load that would be required. Ironically, by the time the site was
able to cope with the traffic both the interest and the free advertisements of
the site had greatly slowed, giving them excess capacity.
There are some particular web sites that are so popular that any links to
external sites can cause problems for the destination host. These include:
Boing Boing being "BoingBoinged"
Fark.com being "Farked"
Heinz Heise the "Heise effect"
Instapundit an "instalanche"
Kuro5hin being "Kuroded / Corroded". Doesn't happen often.
Memepool
Metafilter
Slashdot the "Slashdot effect"
Something Awful
Penny Arcade being "Wanged"
Sensible Erection getting "SE'd" or "Sensibly Shafted"
Digg being "Digged" or "Dugg," the "Digg Effect"
Top web sites
As of September 2005, the top English language web sites in terms of traffic
ranking as listed by
Alexa
[3] were:
Yahoo
MSN
Google
Passport.net
eBay
Microsoft
Amazon
MySpace
Google UK
AOL
BBC Online
CNN
Go
Fastclick
Blogger
Alibaba
Xanga
Casale Media
eBay UK
craigslist
See also
References
- ↑ Miller, Rich, "Bush
Campaign Web Site Rejects Non-US Visitors",
2004-10-26.
External links
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This guide is licensed under the GNU
Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia.
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