By Sandor Panton, Contributor
IN THE Internet world, 'Traffic' can be defined as the amount of user activity on a web site. As more and more Jamaican companies and individuals establish an on-line presence, it's not uncommon to hear or read grand announcements about the traffic that some web sites receive, whether daily, weekly or monthly.
The key to interpreting this information lies in understanding the web site traffic terminology, especially given that some of these terms are quite misleading. A good example of this is the term 'hit'. It's not uncommon to hear of a web site getting X-thousand hits over whatever period of time. The average person might be easily fooled into thinking that each 'hit' is representative of an actual person visiting this web site. Quite the contrary however, when someone visits a specific web page, each element of the page including graphics, multimedia and the HTML file itself are all counted as individual hits.
So, if you use an example with a single web page that has 49 individual graphics plus the actual HTML file itself, then that page would generate 50'hits' each and every time it was visited by a surfer. If the same surfer visited the web page 10 times for the day, then that would result in 500 hits by that surfer for that day alone.
In the early days of the Internet, 'hits' was commonly used to determine the amount of traffic to a web site. However, as businesses and individuals sought to isolate the exact number of times a web page was accessed as well as the number of unique visitors that accessed the page, the use of 'hits' was replaced by two more informative measures page views and unique visitors.
A page view (or page impression) is the number of times that a web page is viewed / loaded. So if a site received 50,000 page views for a given month, it simply means that Surfers viewed various pages or documents across the site a total of 50,000 times. The term 'Unique visitors' (or uniques) is self-explanatory and is undoubtedly one of the better measures of actual web site traffic.
So, how do you know that the page views and or unique visitor figures that a web site announces are true? There is no perfect tool to provide this information without having administrator/owner access to the site itself, but www.alexa.com does provide a good measure of how the millions of web site on the Internet today measure up against each other. You can use Alexa.Com to check the 'Traffic Rank' of a specific web site or even compare it to other sites (like or unlike). Again, although it is not necessarily an exact measure, it's definitely good enough to provide you with a fairly accurate measure of the traffic and popularity of just about any web site.
Sandor Panton is an Internet specialist and consultant. If you have any comment, contact him at feedbackjamaica-gleaner.com. This series is brought to you by www.go-jamaica.com, the portal website of the Jamaica Gleaner.
