Image by mcastellani via Flickr

by Sabrina Parsons

A Web plan should include realistic estimates of projected Web traffic. The first step is to look at the details on measuring projected traffic, and how and where to develop realistic estimates. Regardless of whether your website strategy involves selling products, or bringing in community members, or even developing content, in all cases measuring website traffic and user sessions is a good way for you to gauge how many people are using your hybrid site, and where you need to improve your website in order to get better conversion rates.

Establishing what units to measure

Your first step is to establish measurement units. Measuring Internet traffic is a new challenge. Technology and standards are changing fast. If you ever hear anyone talking about how many “hits” they get on their website you know that they are misinformed. A given page view can produce as many as 100 hits, depending on how many images you display on your pages, rendering the statistics unit “hits” completely useless.

One way the Internet industry measures usage focuses on page views and users. You may also want to measure your banner impressions, as a percentage of total page views, if you are hosting advertising banners.

Two favorite measurements are page views and unique user sessions. If you can track the number of unique users that visit your site, and know how many of your website pages the average user views, then you have some very valuable data. You can tell potential investors that you have X number of page views a month, and X number of unique users a month. You can then impress them further by showing the value of your users, and say that each one of your unique users looks at an average of X pages whenever they visit your website.