In getting people to visit your website it’s important to ensure you’re getting the correct type of traffic. It’s also crucial to analyze key metrics to understand whether or not your traffic is growing over time.
You must have have a good understanding of the people who visit your website. Having skills that analyse the behavior of your site visitors will aid the success of your site.
Let’s kick off with some basic terminology.
Different Traffic sources;
Organic – users who got in through internet search
Paid – users who clicked on a paid ad
Social – people who found your site through social media platforms
Direct – users who come to your site directly using your web address.
Key metrics
Metrics are the measurements of trackable actions on your website to analyze over time.
Users – Visitors who starts a session on your site.
New users – Visitors who came to your site for the first time
Sessions – Groups of interactions taken by individual users within the same visit
Pages per session – The number of pages a user visits within a session
Average session duration – The length of time a user stays on your site within the same session
Bounce rate – A percentage of one-page sessions compared to all sessions on your website
Conversion rate – The number of completed conversions on your page or site compared to all interactions
Connecting website analytics tools:
To analyze your traffic, first you must collect the data. With this it’s critical to connect accurate, insightful measurement tools before launching your site. Here is a list of some very good choices :
Google Analytics
Google Analytics is more like the global search engine leader. The free version is comprehensive and contains enough metrics to get you started. Many premium analytics program draw from Google Analytics
Google Search Console
Google Search Console relates to how people behave on Google organic search before landing on your website. The reporting from Google Search Console should not be overlooked as the data is incomparable for insights into how users find your site.
HubSpot
This platform has a comprehensive list of features and offers though limited but helpful assortment of free tools which includes how users interact with on site forms and tracking across multiple sessions for returning users.
What to watch out for in your web traffic analysis:
You need to know exactly what you’re getting with your traffic,this is a crucial way to judge your site and find out where you need to improve. Then you can spend less time developing your site and more time focusing on improving your business.
Top Pages
You need to know what pages your audience tends to visit this is one of the first things you should analyze. What pages are getting the most organic traffic? What pages do people navigate to most often after landing on your website for the first time? What pages have the highest bounce rate?
Traffic Volume
If you have a website, you should know how many people come to your site each day.For deeper analysis, break down your total traffic volume by channel.
Organic traffic volume is the number of visitors who enter your website from organic search engines, such as Google or Bing, and click to see the main content. In a situation where your Bing organic traffic goes up while Google users decline, you can deduce that you have a ranking issue on Google and can then dive into individual landing pages and search rankings to diagnose what went wrong.
Conversion
Check if your site is converting your visitors. Conversions can be online sales, lead form completions, or app downloads, and more, depending on your site goals. Know what strategies are working and what are not.
Sales
How does your site look to people who aren’t interested in your products or services? What kinds of information do people want from you? What are people searching for? Knowing these types of conversion data will help you prioritize your resources, such as where to find new traffic and even what new products to develop.