When it comes to growing your online presence, website traffic is one of the most important factors at play. Website traffic refers to the number of visitors your site receives on a daily, monthly, and annual basis.
Tracking your website traffic is important for managing your website or business, but without the right tools it can be hard to know where to start.
Luckily, we’ve done all the hard work for you! In this handy guide, we’ll take you through everything there is to know about tracking your website’s traffic.
Here, we’ll cover the best tools for analyzing site traffic, what these tools look for, as well as why website traffic is so important in the first place.
So let’s jump right in!
Why Is Traffic So Important?
First things first – let’s take a look at why website traffic is so important when it comes to growing your online presence.
Website traffic refers to how many people access your website on a day-to-day basis. The higher your website traffic, the more visitors your site is receiving.
Monitoring your website’s traffic is important for several reasons. First and foremost, it allows you to track your site’s growth and see how well it’s doing. Checking your website traffic lets you analyze how your site is performing daily, as well as its growth over a monthly and yearly basis.
Web traffic also lets you see what’s working best for your site by comparing the trending highs and lows of your site’s visitor count against the types of content your website is producing.
Keeping track of how your site is performing through the number of visitors it receives will let you see the best direction to take your site moving forward, so you optimize your content to help your online presence grow as quickly as possible.
How Do You Track Website Traffic?
So now that we’ve covered why tracking your website traffic is so important in the first place, let’s take a look at how you can do it yourself.
There are several ways that you can keep an eye on the traffic to your website. The easiest way to track your site’s traffic is by using an analytics tool.
These help you keep track of your website traffic (among other things such as the platforms your visitors are using and the most valuable visitors to your website) through the use of different metrics and data collection tools.
The most popular analytics tool for tracking website traffic is Google Analytics; this analytics tool is free to anyone with a Google account, and can be used to track anything from your site’s traffic to the geolocation of your site’s visitors.
It also comes up with roadmaps with the best steps for growing your website going forward.
For example, Clicky offers real-time analysis of your site traffic, while Fathom Analytics (a paid, open-source alternative to Google Analytics) provides an in-depth breakdown of your site’s growth and how to best improve it.
How Do Analytics Tools Track Your Website Traffic?
Analytics tools such as Google Analytics, Clicky, and Fathom Analytics use a series of metrics to break down and analyze the traffic to your website.
These include general analytics (ie. how many people are visiting your website on a daily, monthly, and annual basis), along with more specific metrics like visitor behavior and visitor identity.
Visitor behavior and visitor identity are essentially what their names sound like. Visitor behavior refers to what and how visitors to your website interact with it.
For instance, if there are any links to other pages on your website, visitor behavior analyzes which links visitors click on and how often they do it.
Meanwhile, visitor identity covers the demographics of people accessing your website. This includes their location, as well as what platform they’re accessing your website from (ie. mobile or desktop).
While visitor behavior and visitor identity might not seem like the most important metrics to track, knowing who’s visiting your website can be incredibly helpful when you’re trying to grow your online presence.
By tracking the types of people who are visiting your website, you can make adjustments to cater to your largest audience demographics to improve your site’s traffic.
Not every analytics tool uses the same metrics as others, so take a look at different options before settling on one to find the analytics that show you what you want to see!
How To Improve Website Traffic
Tracking your website traffic won’t do you much good if you don’t improve it. As mentioned before, keeping track of the visitors to your site can help you improve traffic by seeing who is visiting your site and how you can cater to these demographics.
Many analytics tools do more than just measure site traffic, and will give you advice on how to best grow your online presence. Optimizing your site will help you boost the traffic to your website and help your site grow.
Improving your SEO rank will massively boost traffic to your site by making sure it’s seen by the largest audience possible.
SEO isn’t the only way to reach a wider audience, however. Promoting your site and/or business online also puts more attention on it and boosts traffic.
Consider promoting your site on social media posts or use advertising to increase the amount of visitors to your site.
Affiliate programs are similar and offer the same great benefits. This is when you use links to other websites in your site, who will link back to you in return.
Affiliate links mean that there are more ways for visitors to access and interact with your website.
Final Thoughts
Website traffic is one of the most important factors when it comes to building your online presence. Luckily, keeping track of your site’s traffic is easy when you know what you’re doing.
So now that you know how to track your website traffic (as well as other things you should look out for and how to boost traffic to your site), it’s time to put your newfound knowledge into practice!
Hi, my name is Justin Shaw, I started my career with a Masters in Computer Science but found writing to be my forte'.
I'm now the Principal Tech writer for GshiftLabs.com as well as a few other well known publications. I help make the complex world of Tech-Jargon easy to understand.
