For those you that are relatively new to the workings of a website, there are lot of terms you may be unfamiliar with. One of the questions raised in the comments on my Active Rain traffic post, was what is a session. In practical terms, a session is a visit from a web surfer that actual spends time on your website. Web traffic is divided up into hits, sessions, returning users and unique or first time visitors.
So first lets break it down. You will see advertising on web portals claiming x number of hits per month or day, blah blah basically we have crazy traffic pay our fee and get listed! Well a hit is just that, a hit to the server could be a variety of things. A graphic load off of your web host is considered a hit. More graphics on the page, more hits. In terms of your visitors, hits are not a good determining factor, you want high sessions.
Sessions as I stated above are actual visitors that have remained on your site, looked around at different pages, in other words, spent time in your website. How do you see this information? Well if you bought a site from some of the most common vendors of real estate websites, like Advanced Access, you should have a back end program (program running on their servers) that you can log into and view all kinds of information about your site. Not only how much traffic you have received, but where it came from, how it got there, etc. I'm sure point2 users, a la mode, etc also have similar programs available. If your service doesn't provide it, there are several free server side programs you can use like webalizer, that will analyze and organize your web traffic for you (you would have to have the program uploaded to your webhost provider's server). There are also several programs you can load on the page to provide some stats for you, like statcounter, ipstat, shinystat, sitetracker, etc googling the term free stat trackers will generate a ton of sites offering free tracking. Most are very basic, nothing more that a simple hit counter. Some will actually give you useful information, like where your visitors are coming from up to specific countries, the pages they viewed, how many visitors are returning visitors, etc.
Which brings me to unique and returning visitors. Probably the most important thing is the number of unique visitors you receive in a day. These are people that have never seen your site before. That number will give you a true idea of the amount of traffic you really are receiving. A good example to further explain this would be the amount of contacts you receive. For instance you are showing several hundred sessions a day, but have received only a handful of leads. Upon inspection of your tracking, you show only about 50 unique visitors. Which would account for the lack of leads being generated. Some of your visitors (quite a bit in this case) are returning to your site, which isn't a bad thing. Keep them coming back and eventually they will contact you. Chris I hoped this answered your question.-Charles
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