Traffic in online advertising is a catch-all term for visitors to a site (the online equivalent of “foot traffic” for a physical shop). It is mostly used interchangeably with inventory (eg “How much traffic do you get?” and “How much inventory do you have” is the same question).
7 Things To Know About Traffic
- AKA Visitors. Or Inventory. Or Hits. Or Pageviews. Or Visits. Or Data. Or Sessions. Ok ok, you caught me, it doesn’t have a strict meaning.
- Slightly over half (52%) of all web traffic is generated by bots. Bots are used to automatically collect data from websites (inc. by Google), and *most* are not intended to be malicious in any way.
- Legitimately increasing traffic is the best way to increase a website’s profitability. Improving a site can increase sales or ad impressions, but both rely on having enough visitors to start with.
- Traffic is often tracked via the use of cookies.
- According to Ahrefs, over 90% of web pages receive no traffic from Google Search at all. If you have web pages that get zero traffic – either fix them, delete them, or merge them with other pages.
- Google Analytics is arguably the best way to keep track of your traffic. It’s free & simple to use (and set up) – but has advanced options and uses too.
- Measuring and analysing your traffic is vital for almost any website so that you can understand and improve your site’s performance.
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