Common Traffic Terms Demystified

You’ve likely seen the terms bounce rate, return visitor, and page views hundreds of times if you are a blogger or looking into starting your first blog. Those terms are commonly used, and often confused.

Photo by DDFic

This post will sort all the definitions out, making it easy to tell the difference between them. After you’ve read through the post, please let us know whether you enjoyed it, or if we may have missed a term.

Note: There may be small differences between what others will tell you, but these are the standards used by many traffic analytics suites.

• Bounce Rate (or exit rate) – The percentage of initial visitors to a site who leave the page to visit another site without traveling onto another one of your pages. An ideal (or perfect) bounce rate is 20-35%, with anything lower even better. Above 50%, and you need to work on improving your site’s layout.
• Hit – A commonly used, but really inaccurate method of determining your site’s popularity. It’s the number of requests for a file from the server. The average site has hundreds of elements and files, so each visitor will add hundreds of “hits.”
• Page View – A page view represents all the hits, or the process of loading an entire page. Each visitor may also have multiple page views, should they refresh or travel onto additional pages.
• Unique Page View – A total of page views by the same visitor during a session. In analytics software, it will be represented by the number of sessions during which that page was viewed one or more times.
• Visit- A visit to your page occurs when someone visits your website for a certain period of time, but then becomes inactive, for a period of ~30 minutes. If the visitor returns after the initial period, it will be considered as an additional visit, but not as an additional visitor.
• Visitor – Someone who visits your website, which can occur multiple times, determined by cookies or IP address.
• Unique Visitor – Tracked when you have someone using a different IP address, user agent, or cookie used to access your site.
• Repeat Visitor – Someone who has visited your site in the past, but is returning.
• New Visitor – A visitor who has never visited your site in the past.
• Pages/Visit – The average number of pages your visitors view per session. If you receive 500 visits, and 1,000 page views, you’ll see two pages/visit.
• Average Time on Site – The average time a visitor spends on your site.
• Exit Pages – The pages that visitors exit from, often used to determine what pages need work.
• Landing Page – This is the page visitors land on when referred to through other sites.
• Traffic Source – The referring sites, which deliver new traffic to your site.

Please share any additional terms with us in the comments area below.