You can check your site's traffic using specialized services or counters, such as Yandex.Metrica, GoogleAnalytics or LiveInternet. Today, they are one of the key tools for any web resource.
Let's look at how you can find out the site traffic, using Yandex.Metrica as an example. For this, "Standard reports" are used, which contain traffic graphs. When viewing, it is important to know the difference between visits and visitors, and what is considered traffic. Let's look at these issues.
A visit or session is the actions of one visitor on the site before the timeout, the waiting time until the system counts a person's inaction as one visit. If a user visited the site, viewed several pages, then took a 40-minute break and upon returning went to a new page of the resource, this is considered a metric for 2 visits. The timeout can be configured in the counter, the default value is half an hour.
Thus, a visit is considered viber data package complete if the visitor does nothing on the site for more than 30 minutes. If he continuously views the pages of the resource for two hours, interrupting for no more than half an hour, this is considered one session. If a person came to the site from an advertising banner, this is a separate visit.
Calculating website traffic
A visitor is a user who has visited a resource during a certain period of time. He will be considered unique if he has a certain set of characteristics - IP address, cookies, browser, etc. The sessions of this visitor include all visits of one user if he saves cookies, visits the site from one web browser, including a mobile one.
Let's say a person visits your resource from a work computer using the Chrome browser, and then from their smartphone, where they are logged in to the same web browser. In this case, one visitor will be registered, but two visits. If the user uses a different browser from the smartphone, Yandex.Metrica will consider this as two different visitors.
Although by default traffic is the number that appears in the "Visitors" column, it is necessary to clarify what exactly we are talking about in each specific case. If we are talking about visits to the site, we should pay attention to the number of sessions, and if we are talking about specific people, we should pay attention to the number of visitors.
It is worth noting that the number of visits is usually greater than the number of visitors. The greater the difference between these two indicators, the more people visit the resource several times.
Remember that the term "website traffic" can be used for both sessions and visitors in different sources. However, we most often mean visits by this term, as this is an indicator that reflects the quality of the resource itself.
Let's talk about analyzing site traffic depending on sources. For this purpose, Yandex.Metrica has a "Sources, summary" report, which shows the change in its volume depending on the origin in a clear graphical form.
Example: if your site is penalized, search traffic will decrease. In this case, launching a PR campaign will compensate for this drop. However, if you do not analyze traffic by source, you may get the impression that advertising is ineffective, since the total volume of traffic and orders has not changed. With such a suspicion, you must first study its change depending on the origin. To display the percentage of traffic by source for a period, visual pie charts are usually used.
Detailed reports can show which search engine is bringing in more target traffic and which keywords are worth paying attention to when promoting a website – which of them are bringing potential customers to the website, and which will not be effective. They are also used to evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and identify failed ones.