Certain terms are commonly used when talking about web traffic. At Traffic Jack we understand that not everyone is familiar with these terms. Accordingly we provide a brief definition or explanation for each term. Contact us if you need any further clarification or if your question is not covered in our detailed FAQ’s.
Hit – is really a technical term that refers to when a file is actually loaded from a web server. More commonly though it is often used to refer to when a visit (see below) occurs. In reality, several hits can actually occur when a web page is loaded. Web traffic is not sold in terms of ‘hits’ but rather in actual ‘visitors’.
Visit (or Visitors) – this is the term that refers to when someone loads a webpage from your server. Also used to reflect when a person is shown or redirected to your website.
Impression – normally used to refer to the display of an advertisement (e.g. banner ad).
Unique Traffic – used in describing a facet of traffic campaigns. To ensure that your site is not constantly seen by the same group of people visiting some of the large volume sites that provide traffic to our network, conditions are placed on the processing of the traffic order to ensure that the visitors are unique. Campaigns are sometimes classified as 24-hour unique meaning that the same person does not see your site twice within a 24-hour period. Most of our campaigns are actually “campaign unique” meaning that your site would not be seen by the same person twice within the whole period of your campaign.
Raw Traffic – as the name implies, this is traffic that is not filtered to be “unique” and may include multiple viewings by the same person. It is generally accepted that this type of traffic, which is obviously cheaper, will be around 60% to 75 % unique.
CPM - this is an abbreviation used to refer to the “cost per thousand”. This is the way that web traffic is normally quoted so that the cost can be determined for various campaign sizes. For example if a CPM of $4.60 were quoted, then an order of 10,000 visitors would cost $46.00.
CPC - this is an abbreviation for “cost per click” and relates to paying for each time that a specific advertisement (such as a banner or text ad) is actually clicked on by a visitor. For example, a reference to $0.35 CPC would mean a cost of 35 cents per click.
PopUps – this is when a separate browser window automatically loads to display something when another webpage is loaded or closed. PopUnders are similar but are displayed under the original browser page. PopIns and Fly-ins are similar and are actually displayed directly over the main browser window.