Web traffic is the amount of data sent and received by visitors to a website. This necessarily does not include the traffic generated by bots. Since the mid-1990s, web traffic has been the largest portion of Internet traffic. This is determined by the number of visitors and the number of pages they visit.
There are two types of traffic estimation tools:
- Tools that estimate total traffic: Visitors to your website can come from all kinds of places: search engines; forums; social media; etc. These tools estimate the total amount of traffic from all sources.
- Tools that estimate only organic traffic: Most websites get a good chunk of their traffic from search engines like Google; this is called “organic traffic.” Estimates from these tools don’t take into account traffic from any other sources (e.g., social media) besides organic traffic.