What is Traffic?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Web Traffic

Traffic is the name given to visitors to your website. Clearly you won't be able to generate significant profits unless you are able to generate a lot of web traffic and so Internet marketers focus a lot of attention on traffic generation.

But more important than traffic is targeted traffic. This is traffic that is interested in what you are selling or promoting. For example if you are selling DVDs you won't get far if everyone landing on your website is interested in buying beach balls. You want people who are looking to buy DVDs.

Many beginners or newbies fail to understand that different types of traffic have very different values and this applies to AdSense sites as well as websites that promote specific products or services.

Even targeted traffic will vary in value. Going back to our DVD example people looking for DVDs are probably less likely to buy than people who are looking to buy or rent DVDs. So web traffic consisting of people specifically interested in buying is more valuable than web traffic consisting of people with a more general interest.

The volume of traffic you get is also not as important as its value. To take an extreme example if you sell jumbo jets you only need one person a week who is close to buying a plane to be doing very well indeed. If you sell 5 cent pencils you need a lot more.

Traffic tends to be measured in terms of unique visitors per day which counts someone who lands on your website and visits several different pages as a single visitor. An alternative count is page views which is simply the number of times any pages on your site are viewed in a day. The difficulty comes with people who visit several pages on your site, go away for a few hours and then come back again. Ideally your website statistics package can distinguish between genuine first time visitors and returners.

You can buy web traffic from many sources online but you need to be careful to purchase only traffic that is targeted: you won't make any money from totally untargeted web traffic because it just won't be interested in what you sell or offer.