How to Monitor Your Website Traffic: A Simple Guide
November 28th 2021 | By Steve Grant
If you want to get the most out of your website, you need to monitor its traffic. Track visitors, and monitor what they do when they get there. This is the only way you’ll be able to improve results and increase conversions.
Measurement in marketing is vital. How else will you know if your strategies are working and your campaigns are performing? Website traffic analysis will allow you to see whether your site is meeting your objectives, by measuring performance indicators.
But how to monitor your website traffic? There are plenty of powerful analysis tools out there. But what exactly should you be monitoring? What are the key stats you need to focus on if you’re going to make any sort of improvements to the way your site performs? Let’s take a look to how to check organic traffic of a website, and explore the most important reports you’ll want to be looking at.
How to track traffic on my website?
First things first, a look at some of the most popular website traffic analysis tools…
Google Analytics has to be the most well-known tool for web traffic monitoring. It’s free, simple to use and offers the added benefit of being able to link to all your other Google platforms, including Google Ads, and YouTube. So you get to connect with all the platforms across which your audience interacts with your brand.
Ahrefs is a web traffic analysis tool that allows you to analyse competitor traffic. With this platform, it’s possible to track the keywords that your competitors are ranking for in the search engines, and see the volumes of traffic that come with them. Being able to see the content that brings competitors the most traffic is a very valuable advantage, which can serve as a source for keyword research and help shape highly competitive organic SEO campaigns.
SEMrush works in a similar way to Ahrefs, although it is renowned as the best tool for keyword research and analysis, whilst Ahrefs is known more for its backlink monitoring capabilities. SEMrush allows you to analyse keywords and the volumes of traffic going to competitor sites, which reveals the overall competitiveness of the industry. You can also track the likes of traffic sources and unique visitors.
Which reports indicate how traffic arrived at a website, and how your site is performing generally?
If you’re just going to use a website traffic analysis tool to track the number of visitors landing on your site, you’re not really going to get much value out of it. Whilst you’ll get an insight into how certain pages are performing, it’s important to dig deeper into what’s really going on with your site and its traffic.
The following metrics are, we believe, the most important you should be tracking:
Bounce rate: this is the number of visitors who landed on a certain page of your website, then left without clicking on any other sections of your site. Generally, the lower the bounce rate, the more interesting and relevant visitors are finding your site. A high bounce rate will negatively impact your organic rankings, as well as any paid advertising campaigns you may be running.
Page views: a page view is an instance of a page being loaded or reloaded in a browser. This metric is defined as the total number of pages viewed.
Organic search traffic: this is the number of visitors who landed on your site after finding you in the organic search results. If you are running a PPC campaign, you’ll be able to compare how much traffic lands on your site from organic versus paid-for sources.
Conversions: this shows the number of users who entered your website and completed actions corresponding to your predefined marketing goal. Such goals could be visiting a page, spending a certain amount of time on that page, completing a form, requesting a call back, sharing a post or clicking to call a phone number.
Visits or sessions: a visit or session is the one-time journey of the user on your website, beginning with their first point of entry and ending when they leave.
Number of pages per visit: this refers to the number of pages that a single user visited during a single session on your website.
Traffic source: this is a very important metric, as it enables you to see precisely which of your online marketing activities are the most effective. Whether it’s a search engine, a referrer or direct traffic, you’ll be able to identify which of your campaigns are most worthwhile, so you can ditch anything that’s not working.
If you’re running an SEO campaign, it’s important to know how to check organic traffic of a website. Web analytics for search can prove very enlightening, as you may find that visitors are arriving using keywords you hadn’t considered, or through sources you may not have known about.
It is important to always have an objective in mind when you are running online marketing campaigns of any nature. That way, you can analyse your campaign specifically against those objectives to see how well it is performing.
Looking to boost traffic to your website?
At Figment, we’ve been helping local businesses in London and Surrey boost their web traffic and enjoy more sales for many years. Using proven tactics, we’ve achieved countless Page One rankings for our clients, and have been rewarded with over 50 five-star Google ratings as a result.
If you could use some help in attracting more traffic to your website, you are welcome to get in touch.