If you are looking to enhance your website, it would do you well to look into your website analytics, specifically your website traffic data. Website traffic data will give you a better understanding of who your audience is, where they find your content, and how often and how long they interact with it. This data is crucial because it determines what content you have provides the most value and can help you make decisions on what platforms are helping you reach more website viewers. This article will help you figure out your website’s traffic and how to interpret this information for your site’s benefit.
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What is Website Traffic and Why is It Important?
Before we talk about how to find information about website traffic, it’s important to understand what website traffic exactly is. Website traffic refers to the number of sessions or visits your site has. In other words, it is simply the volume of people that end up visiting your site. However, website traffic data does not only tell you how many people visit your site, but can also give you insight into your audiences’ behavior on their site.For example, website traffic can help you determine how long your site visitors are staying on your site, which pages on your websites seem to be the most interesting to your viewers, analyze how your marketing efforts for your site are going, figure out where your website traffic is coming from, and can help you determine how smoothly your site is running in general. Clearly, the data you can find out through website traffic are extremely valuable and important to know and understand. Now, let’s talk about how we can easily find out website traffic data through website traffic checkers.
Data Point Definitions
Determining your website’s traffic data is a quick and seamless process that you can easily accomplish yourself! The most popular and well known tool to use in figuring out your website traffic data is Google Analytics. A great perk of Google Analytics is that it is free, however there are a number of paid services that provide a more comprehensive look into your data. Although paid options can also be great, it’s best to start with something free and simple. Regardless of what website traffic checker you choose to use, there are a number of specific data points you are going to want to take a look at.
Number of Visits
This data point allows you to figure out your overall website data. Since each visit is tracked, you are also able to see the amount of visits from someone who has returned to your site multiple times.
Number of Visitors
This data point will show you how many unique visits are coming to your site. These unique visitors are those that have not been to your site before. It’s a great data point to help you see if you are gaining new visitors to your site.
Bounce Rate
Bounce rate will show you how many visitors are leaving your site after having just arrived. The goal is to have a low bounce rate. If your site visitors are leaving way too soon, your website may not have been what they were hoping for or there could potentially be a problem with the way your site loads or runs. Regardless, if you have a high bounce rate, it could be a red flag. How long your visitors stick around your site is a very important data point to consider as it is telling to the type of content you are producing.
Referrals
Referrals is a data point that shows you where your visitors are finding you from such as social media platforms, search engine searches, or other websites . Knowing this metric can help you fine tune your marketing plan for your website.
Average Time on a Page
Knowing how long your audience is spending on your pages is important to see what catches their attention most. If you notice that certain pages are doing a lot better or noticeably worse than others, it could be a sign to make some changes.
Conversion Rate
This is one of the most important data points! Conversion rate is all about analyzing if your “call to action” is working. In other words, it tells you how many of your site viewers end up purchasing the product you’re selling, signing up for the email list that you offer, completing the survey you’re handing out, etc. Whatever your call to action is, the conversion rate helps you determine which of your viewers are enticed enough to engage with it.
How To Set Up Google Analytics
It takes some time to learn how to use Google Analytics, but once you know how to use it, it can really help your company. To get started, you’re going to want to make sure that you are signed in with the Google Account that you wish to manage your analytics with. When you’ve made sure of that, you’re going to want to go to the Google Analytics setup and click the blue button that says start measuring. It will then prompt you to input an “Account Name”. You may notice that there are some data sharing boxes ticked. You can untick them if you choose.Next, you are going to want to choose the type of property you are looking to measure. For example, if you want to measure a website, app, or both. You’re going to want to choose a website if this is the property you’re measuring. You’ll then be asked to add some details about the site such as the name, the website URL, industry category, and the reporting time zone. After this section is complete, you must then hit create. You will then see a terms of service to agree to. Once you’ve looked over that, click agree.
Tracking Codes
You should now be given a unique tracking code. To track your website, you’re going to have to install this code onto every page of your site. Installing the code can go two different ways. The first way is adding your Google Analytics script to your header.hp file before closing the closing tag ( </head> ) in order to install it across every single one of your pages. If your website does not provide you with this feature, you can go about the second way which is installing a plug in. Using a plug in is safe and easy and once you find one you like, you can simply install it onto your device and add in your tracking code.
Testing Your Analytics
Once you have added the code to your site, you will need to do a test to make sure that Google Analytics is working. To do this, go to Google Analytics and click on the ‘Realtime” button and then hit “Overview”. You will then be able to see what is happening on your site at that moment. Then you will want to open up another browser and wait for Google Analytics to pick up your visit. If you have correctly installed your tracking code, Google Analytics will show you that there is at least one active user on your site. Once you’ve completed all these steps, you should be good to go!
How to Interpret Google Analytic Data
Now that you have everything set up, you might be wondering how to go about interpreting the data that Google Analytics gives you. Well, once you log into Google Analytics, you will see a “Home” dashboard on the left hand side of your screen which gives you an overview of your site’s performance. In this dashboard you will see a number of different tabs labeled realtime, audience, acquisition, behavior, conversions. For starters, the real time report gives you real time data. You can see how many visitors are viewing your site at that moment, you can see your top referrals, top pages, top keywords, and top locations of where your viewers are.
Audience Report
The audience report gives you in depth data about the people viewing your site. It’ll allow you to get insight on their demographics such as age and nationality, their interests in regard to your site, where they are located, their behavior on your site, and the technology that they are viewing your site with. The audience report data is extremely helpful in understanding how to improve your data.
Acquisition Report
The Acquisition Report is where the bulk of the website traffic data will be located and can give you a great site traffic estimate. Under this report you will find a breakdown of where your website traffic is coming from. The report divides itself into categories that display whether your traffic is organic; such as traffic from a search engine like Google, direct; such as when someone directly types your URL into Google, is from a referral, an email, a social media platform, a paid search, a display advertisement, or an affiliate link. As you can see there are multiple traffic sources and Google Analytics does a great job of creating easy to read and interpret graphs that display the data.
FAQs
- How do I create a marketing plan for my site?
- Can I improve my website traffic?
- How much do premium website traffic checkers cost?
- Can I hire someone to analyze my website traffic data?
- How do I make sure my website traffic data is up to date?
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