Online marketing/ Web mobile convergence news

Overview of traffic

Definition of hits:
A single request from a Web browser for a single item from a Web server.

Hits in general are used as an indicator of traffic to a web site. There is however little to no value in evaluating the hits as it does not indicate time spent within the web site. Hits can be quite high or low as will be seen in the comparison, but it does not indicate whether the person that clicked on the link spent time there or not. A "single request" as per definition could also indicate a graphic down loaded so how do we know whether the hit was a down loaded graphic or a person that actually spent time in the site?

Definition of a visitor:

A visitor is a user that spends time browsing your site - logged in the site's statistics as a referring URL and "time spent" in the site.

Consistent growth in visitors occurred since the launch of this site. In July 2001 (AS PART OF AN EXPERIMENT), we submitted this site to a FFA (Free for all link farm). It increased traffic dramatically during July. FFA sites are known to drive non-targeted traffic. It seems as if the traffic driven to this site resulted in visitors spending time in the site, but looking at the enquiries we know that it was not targeted traffic.

The drop in visitor rate during August was to be expected (after the submission to FFA sites in July). FFA sites are now banned from search engine and with good reason too.