If you want to get the most out of your website, you are going to need to monitor its traffic. You’ll need to track visitors, and analyse their behaviour on your site. Without monitoring website traffic, you’ll never be equipped with the knowledge required to make improvements to your website, increase conversions and achieve your goals.
With this in mind, we’re taking a look at how to monitor website traffic, the tools available to help you do so, and the type of metrics you should be concerned with.
First things first… why monitoring website traffic is so important
Measurement in marketing is vital. How else will you know if your strategies are working and your campaigns are performing?
Monitoring website traffic will allow you to see whether your site is meeting your objectives, by measuring your key performance indicators. But there are many more benefits than this.
Content planning
By looking at your web statistics, you’ll be able to better understand the type of content that your audience is hungry for. This is important, as it will show you what you should be focusing your content marketing efforts on in the future.
The more you put into analysing your web traffic and audience behaviours, the more finely honed your content plan can become, and the more competitive your website.
Source optimisation
Monitoring website traffic and visitor behaviour allows you to see precisely where your visitors are coming from. And it may surprise you!
This valuable information could show you what geographical regions or countries may be attracting the highest volume of converting traffic. You also get to see the industry types and demographics (age, gender, interests, etc.) that are most interested in your site, and particular pages on it.
So you might consider translating your content to suit your visitor nationality, or optimise your site and its content to appeal to particular business sectors and demographics.
You may also be prompted by this data to optimise for sources you’re not seeing, the ones you believe you should be targeting.
Trend spotting
Monitoring website traffic, page views and impressions can highlight changes in trends or cultural signals that could be important to your business and its future strategies.
This type of data can be used for a variety of tactics, from improving user experience and conversion optimisation, to crafting targeted campaigns and even developing new products or services to address changing needs.
Visitor journey mapping
The journey a visitor takes through your website offers up rich insights into the stage they’re at on their buying journey.
Some may hover around informational content, for example, which shows they’re at the research stage. If they then move on to view certain products or services, you can be satisfied that your information pages did the job. But if they fail to move on and disappear altogether, then this could indicate you need to address your content.
Some visitors may repeatedly view certain products or services, but fail to make a purchase or enquiry. In which case, you’ll need to look into why your site isn’t converting. It might be a lack of trust, unhappy with delivery times, or something else.
Tracking engagement
Monitoring website traffic and scrutinising your analytics can help you track engagement on your site. Are users engaging with your calls to action? Are they taking action on your conversion prompts? Are they watching your videos, downloading your guides, or spending time reading your articles?
High volumes of website traffic are merely cosmetic if visitors are failing to engage and convert. Checking your web stats will help you ascertain whether you need to make any improvements to boost engagement.
Highlighting downfalls
If there are weaknesses within a website or issues preventing conversions, they can be brought to light by analysing your web traffic and page views.
For example, you might see lots of visitors exiting your site from the checkout page, which could signal issues with delivery costs, for example. Or maybe users get no further than the home page. This could mean a page revamp is overdue. Sometimes just subtle changes can make a significant difference.
Monitoring the success of updates or campaigns
If you’ve recently made updates to your website, or launched an online marketing or advertising campaign, the only way you’re going to tell if your efforts have proved fruitful is by monitoring website traffic, page views and conversions.
Maybe there’s been a mild upturn in visitors and conversions, which could be improved by a few tweaks. Or maybe your endeavours have been highly successful, so now you know what works, you can plough more resources into it.
Of course, it could be the opposite, and you may have to go back to the drawing board. But at least you’ll know early on before you’ve gone too far down the line, or wasted time or money.
Supporting decision making
Making decisions without facts and data to support you can be very risky. Should you invest in a new website or a website upgrade? Should you go all out to add more content or media? Should you up your organic SEO or digital marketing budget, or increase your PPC spend?
With the right data insights, you can move forward more confidently as you decide where to allocate your budgets, and better understand where you will achieve the best return on investment.
It is clear to see by all of these benefits that monitoring website traffic can be hugely advantageous.
But how to monitor 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…
GA4
Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is an analytics service that allows you to measure traffic and engagement across your websites and apps. It replaced the longstanding Universal Analytics (UA) in July 2023.
GA4 collects data from your website, creating reports that provide insights into your business. These reports can be used to monitor traffic, analyse data, and understand your website users and their activity.
The reports can either be the overview type, summarising data about a specific area, such as revenue from online purchases or number of web forms submitted. Or they can be detailed reports, providing a more in-depth view.
The main difference between UA and GA4 is that GA4 is user and event-based rather than session-based. This means that all user interactions are captured as ‘events’ rather than the old UA ‘hit types’ such as page hits, etc.
Shifting the focus from sessions to events provides significant benefits to marketers, such as the ability to conduct cross-platform analysis and the power to predict user behaviour.
Search Console
Search Console is another Google tool, this one focused on helping website owners to understand how they are performing on Google Search, and what they can do to enhance their appearance in the search results and attract more relevant traffic to their websites.
Search Console provides insights into how Google crawls, indexes and serves a website, helping you to monitor and optimise your search performance. It is useful in that it sends you an alert to let you know of any issues it detects, allowing you to take action to resolve them.
Using Search Console, you can see whether your site has had any Google Search manual actions issued against it. You can tell Google about a site migration, for example if you move your site to a new domain, allowing you to migrate your Google Search results from your old site to your new site more easily. You can also review any issues with your structured data courtesy of insights into which rich results Google could or could not read from your site.
Ahrefs
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
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:
Engagement rate: in Google Analytics 4, this replaces the old ‘bounce rate’ used in Universal Analytics. Engagement rate is the percentage of meaningfully engaged sessions on your website, whereas bounce rate is the opposite, in other words, the percentage of sessions that did not engage with your website and ‘bounced’ off.
If users do not match the criteria of an engaged session, i.e. the session lasted less than 10 seconds, no conversion event occurred, and there were not a minimum of two page views, then the session would not count as an engaged session. If this was the only session on your website, then the engagement rate would be 0%, and the bounce rate would have been 100%.
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.
How to monitor website traffic – top tips
When monitoring website traffic, it is useful to apply filters. There are lots to choose from, one of the most important being the one that lets you filter out website visits from your own IP address, and that of anyone you have working on your site on your behalf, such as your SEO agency. You can also filter out visits from spam websites so that you focus only on genuine users.
It is also possible to monitor website traffic over set time periods. This is useful if for example you want to see how a change to your site impacted your traffic and page views.
As well as monitoring website traffic of your own, it can prove insightful to analyse competitor data. Some website monitoring tools make it possible to do this, including Similarweb, Ahrefs, Alexa and SEMrush. Do bear in mind though that comparing website traffic will never be 100% accurate as you are looking at estimates, rather than real analytics data.
Monitoring website traffic – in summary
If you’re running an organic SEO campaign, it is essential to know how to check organic traffic of a website. Web analytics for search can prove very enlightening, especially when you partner with an organic SEO company.
Through such a collaboration, you may find that visitors are arriving using keywords you hadn’t considered, or through sources you may not have known about. Working with an experienced organic SEO company can significantly boost your website’s visibility and drive targeted traffic to it.
It is important to always have set goals in mind when you are running online marketing campaigns of any nature, especially if you’re partnering with an online marketing agency in London. 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.
