Blog Traffic Terms Defined – Because Knowing What the Heck You’re Talking About is Always a Good Thing

This Saturday I’m holding an online seminar how to increase traffic to your blog. You should be there, of course (I mean, who doesn’t want more traffic to their blog?). Ahead of the event, though, I want you to not only be prepared in advance, but to know as much about blog traffic as possible. I’m doing this for two reasons:

1. I want to teach you about blog traffic so that you will get the most out of the seminar.
2. I want you to see I know my stuff so you know the seminar will be worth your time and money.

If you want to read the pointy-headed brainiac web analytics definitions of these things, you’ll find them here.

Average Time on Site
The amount of time, on average, a visitor spends on your blog. The majority of your visitors won’t stay very long and may not even be human, so this will seem lower to you than it should (for example, less than two minutes). This can be thrown off by someone who decides to go on vacation while your page is in their browser, and who, upon return, clicks to another page in your blog.

Bounce Rate
Bounce Rate is the percentage of visitors who immediately leave a page upon landing on it. They leave so fast it’s like they “bounce off” the page. You want this as low as possible, especially for search and referral traffic. High bounce rates (over 60%-70% and higher) means your visitors aren’t finding your content relevant or compelling enough to stay for even a moment.

Direct Traffic
Sometimes this is also referred to as “type-in” traffic. These visitors have typed in a URL into their browser’s address bar and are directly visiting your site, rather than reaching your site from clicking a link on another web page. Direct traffic is often the result of your audience having your URL memorized (remarkablogger.com is pretty easy to remember). It can also result from offline advertising methods such as print and television ads.

New Visits
Often confused with unique visits, new visits are simply visitors who have never been to the site before.

Pages per Visit
The average number of pages sent to visitors during their session for a given time period. For example, the average number of pages visited during a month might be 1.36. I have nothing smart-alecky to say about pages per visit.

Page Views
The number of times web pages are sent to browsers during a given time period. For this metric there is no distinction between single post pages in your blog and “static” blog pages such as your About or Contact page. Advertisers are often concerned about page views because higher page views means more times an ad can be displayed (called an impression, but that’s a different vocabulary lesson), which means a greater likelihood the ad will be clicked. Really bad, confusing web navigation also leads to high amounts of page views, but for the wrong reasons.

Referring Site
A referrer is another domain’s web page the visitor was on before coming to your web page by clicking a link on the previous page. Say for some crazy reason Brian Clark decides to link to me. You’re on Copyblogger and you click a link to visit Remarkablogger. That Copyblogger post page is a referring site for the Remarkablogger page.

Returning Visits
The number of tracked visitors who have returned to the site more than once during the reporting period. Having things that don’t work in an email or an RSS reader (like videos or other interactive widgets) will increase returning visits, as will posts in a series where links to the other posts in the series are present. Just telling people to come back doesn’t work so well.

Search Traffic
Search traffic is traffic that arrives through clicking a link in a search engine results page (SERP). If your blog or a post in your blog comes up in a search result, and the searcher clicks the link to your blog, that search engine (who are we kidding, here? We all know it’s Google) has referred traffic to you. In analytics software, such as Google Analytics, it’s possible to see what keywords the visitor was searching on that caused your blog to appear in the results.

Uniques
Unique visits are often confused with new visits, but they are not the same thing. A unique visitor is one person who has visited a site at least once (note that it can be more than once) within a given time period. A new visitor is visiting a site for the first time.

Visits
A visit is simply a session in which a person views pages in a website (well, posts in a blog, in this case). It doesn’t distinguish between new or repeat visits.

Web Analytics
Web analytics is the practice of analyzing web traffic. It’s how we know information about our site visitors and what they’re doing while they’re on our site. It’s also a shorthand for web analytics software or reports from such software. For example, you might say, “Show me the web analytics,” meaning you want to see the numbers on the screen or in a printed report.

Why Does This Stuff Matter?

Traffic is the lifeline of your blog. You may be writing for yourself, but you still want as many of the right people as possible to read what you write (or watch your videos). And if you’re trying to make money online, then the more traffic you have the more money you’ll make. We like to increase the percentage of visitors who buy (that’s called conversion), but simply having higher traffic numbers all around is very desirable. It’s like the rising tide that lifts all the other numbers that matter. This is a numbers game. Knowing how to get more traffic to your blog does more than pay for itself, it can make you money from higher numbers.

More information and registration for the Growing Blog Traffic Seminar