Thousands of bits of data are sent and received by users on the Internet every second of every day. Just imagine how web developers manage to handle such large volumes of data (with different genre such as music files, PDF, and others). Most of these are data that potential customers are looking for. If you can find the people who are looking for data or information related to your site, you can direct them to your site and increase your web traffic.

The more traffic you get, the better it is for your site to become successful and profitable.

How can you determine the traffic that flows from a variety of websites? One parameter is by the number of visitors and the number of pages that they view. The website moderator supervises both incoming and outgoing traffic to determine which parts or pages of the website are most viewed and how long is spent viewing each individual section.

Let us say for instance, you have accessed the webpage of a certain site. Maybe you will notice that there is a certain figure in the page that says, "Welcome! You are the 999,999th visitor." That is one way the site has of determining the traffic to that certain page.

The gathered data in web traffic monitoring helps to configure sites and increase its security system against viruses and hackers.

Measuring Web Traffic

Creating a website can be costly. You may need to hire web designers for that matter. In return, your site must be popular among web users so that it can gain advertisers and promoters. Thus, it creates an income on your part.

By measuring and analyzing your web site's web traffic you will see if your site is popularly viewed. However, how is this done?

Traffic around your site is analyzed by viewing the traffic statistics found in the web server record file. It is an automatically generated list of all the pages served.

This is how it works: A hit is produced when any file is served. The web page itself is considered a file. Images are considered as files, too. Thus, if a certain page has five images, it could generate six hits.

Sometimes web traffic is measured by packet sniffing. Usually a software program can interrupt and monitor traffic passing over a digital network.

As data passes back and forth over the network the sniffer captures each packet and eventually deciphers and examines its content according to the appropriate specifications. All the data that the sniffer captured is recorded and included in the web traffic analysis.

The following information is often gathered when supervising web traffic:

• The quantity of web visitors.
• The average number of page views per visitor. It will indicate that he is going  deep inside that particular site - possibly because he finds the information useful.
• Average visit duration - the total length of a user's visit.
• Average page duration - the length of time the page is viewed. 
•  Busy times - the most popular visiting time of the site. It can be used to decide when is the best time to put advertisement and the most ideal time to do some maintenance.
• The most popular pages.
• Most requested entry pages viewed.
• Most requested exit pages would determine bad pages, broken links, or exit pages that may have a popular external link.
• The top paths or the sequence of pages viewed by visitors from their entry and exit to the site. It identifies which paths they are using to browse the site.
• The external links to determine which sites are creating the most traffic for a particular page.

Once the data has been gathered web planners will use it as a reference on how to improve that particular site. Sometimes there are problems that may arise from a huge quantity of visitors browsing the same site at the same time.

From the gathered traffic data they will now plan some site structuring to accommodate larger volumes of users accessing the site.

Web traffic is an important factor considered when creating a website. Your site will gain popularity to web users if it is easy to access. In addition, fast exchange of information is one of the vital characteristics of an effective website. The faster the site is the more efficiently your visitors will be served. Faster, more efficient service, means that your site can service larger numbers of visitors while using less resources than a slower, less efficient, site.