Traffic is the lifeblood of the internet. A site can be beautiful and packed with desirable content, but without visitors, it languishes. For this reason, webmasters monitor their website traffic very carefully. The search patterns and uses of the internet have become more difficult to track, however, so traffic monitoring is beginning to take a different approach.
What is Traffic Monitoring?
The owners of websites want to know who is coming to their websites. Companies monitor the visitors to sites through various methods and pull information from the computers of their visitors. With the right tracking tools, a webmaster can see:
• How a visitor found his site
• How long the visitor stayed on the site
• What pages of the site he viewed
• How long he stayed on the website total
• Where his computer is located
• How many times he’s been to the site.
Webmasters then use this information to better market their website and create the content and services their visitors appear to be seeking.
Traffic Monitoring Companies
There are many forms of traffic monitoring. Some, such as Alexa and NetRating, take a high end approach to traffic and offer broad overviews of traffic. Other paid services such as Statscounter will give a webmaster specific date about his website traffic including the items listed above. Google analytics offers the same service for no cost, but takes twenty-four hours to update. Paid services show traffic in real-time.
Using Traffic Monitoring
Webmasters who have created their website for internet marketing purposes are very interested in their traffic. The data these programs show can tell them how effective certain pages and items on the site are designed and if the right motivation is in place for making sales.
The new social media movement, however, have made traffic monitoring more difficult. Some tracking programs are unable to detect visitors watching videos or using certain applications. In addition, many of the traffic monitoring companies use different formulas or techniques to gather their information. This means that a single website’s traffic can be reported differently by every monitor.
Changes to Traffic Monitoring
In April of 2007, the Interactive Advertising Bureau released an open letter to monitoring companies including comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings. In the letter, IAB claimed that the companies are not doing an effective job with traffic measures and that changes should be made to keep up with the times.
The internet is a constantly growing medium, and many of the traffic monitors use the same methods radio and television trackers have been using for almost a century. The methods are ineffective and result in poor data. Measurements such as page views and the time spent on a site can be misleading or manipulated by a company.
Large websites such as CNN.com have had trouble reconciling the numbers produced by large scale traffic companies and their own measuring software. This demonstrates the problem – if the largest companies can’t be tracked well, the small niche sites run by many webmasters are sure to be monitored incorrectly.
Marketing and advertising are directly affected by the traffic statistics. The more popular a site is, the more a webmaster can charge for advertising spots and promotional material. Not being able to show exactly how many visitors he’s getting or having multiple, misleading versions of the same data is very troublesome and can cost him substantial revenue.
With the IAB leaning on companies, many believe that traffic monitoring programs will be brought up in standards and begin to use the same or similar methods. This will make the internet data simpler to obtain and more dependable. In short, what is should have been all along.