Friday, 24 October 2014

How to find out about web traffic and Why unique visitors are more important than hits.

When looking at our Niche News competition we also needed to work out how many users visited the competitor sites.

The first site we looked at was http://www.trafficestimate.com/


You can input any site into the search bar and get the number of visits the site has had over the past 30 days. However, they do not tell you the number of unique users. 



This site shows you different ways of calculating the number yourself, depending on the site. It is slightly more reliable as the first site does not recognise some of the less popular websites.

Why are Unique Visitors More Important than Hits?

Hits are pieces of data that includes not only the web page but also every other file that makes it possible. So, a single web page can easily translate into multiple hits so that if a website has received over 1,000 hits, that could mean that the site received only 100 actual visitors in some cases.

Unique visitors are tracked by their unique IP addresses. So, it reflects a single and truly "unique" visitor therefore, you can see how popular your website actually is.

- Ria

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